What Big Teeth E-Book

Rose Szabo

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 485

Beschreibung

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children meets The Addams Family in this haunting story of one girl's attempt to reconnect with her monstrous family.Eleanor has not seen or spoken with her family in years, not since they sent her away to Saint Brigid's boarding school. She knows them only as vague memories: her grandfather's tremendous fanged snout, the barrel full of water her mother always soaked in, and strange hunting trips in a dark wood with her sister and cousins.When Eleanor finally returns to their ancestral home on the rainy coast of Maine, she finds them already gathered in wait, seemingly ready to welcome her back with open arms. But a strange and sudden death rocks the family, and in order to keep the family that abandoned her from falling apart, Eleanor calls upon her mysterious other grandmother from across the sea.Grandmere brings order to the chaotic household, but that order soon turns to tyranny. If any of them are to survive, Eleanor must embrace her strange family and confront the monstrousness lurking deep within her Grandmere – and herself.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.co.uk,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

What Big Teeth

Print edition ISBN: 9781789097818

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097825

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: July 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© Rose Szabo 2021 All rights reserved.

Rose Szabo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

First published by Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, a part of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To my grandmother, Kathleen.She says she does not like books about werewolves,but she is proud of me anyway.

“This he afterwards explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate.”

—DRACULA

Here, said she,Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,(Those are the pearls that were his eyes. Look!)Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,The lady of situations.Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,Which I am forbidden to see.

—T.S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

PROLOGUE

Somewhere in the night forest, the boy is running.

I cannot smell him, like my sister Luma and our cousin Rhys can, his sweat and his fear. But I can hear him, as well as the creak of branches, the rustle of the leaves that stir underfoot. He’s moving from the birch stands onto the pine needles. I can hear the pounding of his blood, the frustrated sob he tries to keep in his mouth as his legs struggle on the unfamiliar ground.

Our other cousin Charlie is here too, clattering through the streambed below on new shoes. He’s clumsy and young, but he has other talents. So do Rhys and Luma, who changed as soon as we left the house and now run on all fours, so silent that even my ears can’t pick them up. I left my shoes on the porch, and my bare feet are whispers on the pine needles, but I’m sure that they can hear my heart beating wild excitement.

It’s spring dusk. A thin crescent moon slices upward through the sky.

The boy bursts out into a clearing, full of tall grass and the burrows of small animals. This is the choke point. The boy puts his foot in a rabbit hole and falls. I glance past him, across the clearing, until I spot a pair of luminescent eyes. Rhys tilts his head up and rumbles. Now.

We all converge at once: Rhys from the right, me from the left, and Luma pounces from behind with both forepaws. The boy goes sprawling onto his stomach under her weight, rolling as we let him get up, scrabbling through the wet grass and trying to get his feet under him again.

Charlie stumbles out of the dark and plants his hands on his knees, wheezing a little. The boy crawls for Charlie. He is saying run. And then he looks at us and notices that Charlie is showing no fear. He begs him for help.

Rhys and Luma nip at the boy’s ankles while I climb onto his back, riding him as they drag him backward into the dark. The boy is still yelling at our cousin. Charlie finally gets a breath into his lungs, straightens up. He pushes his glasses up his nose and trots along after us as we recede toward the tree line.

“Don’t you all ever get tired of this?” Charlie asks us while the boy cries for us to let him go. “Don’t you want to play something else?”

Rhys lets go of the boy’s ankle for a moment, cocks his head up at Charlie, panting, grinning now from a human face. “No,” he says.

We drag the boy back into the shadow of one of the big pine trees. Someone’s yelling for us back at the house. It sounds like the visiting banker has realized his son is missing.

“What should we do with him?” Rhys asks.

“Boil him up into soup,” Luma says. She hates soup, but the joke is lost on the boy, who sobs harder.

Charlie is restless, looking around. “I’m gonna make him forget. We’ll get in trouble if we don’t.”

“Wait.” I hold up a hand. I feel something that’s new, some hungry hollow little place inside me. “I think . . . I want to eat him.”

Rhys slaps me on the back, and Luma squeals with delight. I’ve never wanted to eat anybody before, and they’re proud.

“You can’t, though,” Rhys says quickly.

“We promised Grandma,” says Luma.

“Alright.” I plant my hands on the boy’s shoulders and start to climb down off of him. As I do, my mouth stretches wide like a yawn, although I don’t feel tired. “Let’s go—”

And then something happens that I do not understand. I’m sitting on the pine needles, my jaw aches unbearably, and the boy is gone.

ONE

I opened my eyes, and I was on the train.

I was the only passenger left. How long had I been asleep? I looked down to make sure I still had my things: my straw hat, my suitcase stamped with the letter Z. I’d hung on to them this whole way, through sleeping on a bench in Penn Station and sprinting to catch a train in Boston, ever since I’d left Saint Brigid’s School for Young Ladies this time yesterday. Thinking about it, I ran my tongue over my teeth again. No matter how many times I did it, I could still taste copper.

The door at the far end of the car clattered open, and I jumped. Just the conductor, coming down the aisle to check on me. He looked nervously down at me, and I felt guilty, wondering if he could tell I was on the run.

“You the stop in Winterport?” he said. I nodded. His eyes had wandered down to my suitcase.

“You got people there?” he asked. “I’m kin of the Hannafins, myself.”

People up here were like this, I remembered suddenly. Always wanting to know about your family. “The Zarrins,” I offered.

He twitched like a rabbit before settling himself back down. “I thought you might be,” he said. “They don’t leave Winterport much, do they?”

“I did,” I said. “I haven’t been back in eight years.”

Once I said it I froze, terrified he’d ask me why I was coming back now. I rummaged frantically in my mind for a convincing lie. But he just smiled at me tightly and touched his hat.

“We’ll just be slowing down, not a full stop,” he said. “Don’t worry, people do it all the time. When the whistle blows the first time, get ready.”

He disappeared, and I stared out the window and watched the landscape for a while. It had been almost summer in Maryland, but as we rumbled across the bridge that divides New Hampshire from Maine, I saw a few stubborn patches of snow clinging on beneath the pine trees. I’d been angry when I’d gotten on the train, and that had kept me in motion. But the weather chilled my anger and crystallized it into fear. Maybe there were good reasons I wasn’t supposed to be at home. I had a vague, half-remembered feeling that it wasn’t exactly safe. It all felt faded and vaguely ridiculous. None of it seemed plausible when I held it up to the light. But if it was true, if I was right, then I needed to be home again.

After all, there was no other place for me in the world. Not after what I’d done.

Lucy Spencer flashed in my mind for a moment then. Her red hair coming out of its braid, her face twisted in that expression people make right before they start screaming—

And then the whistle was blowing. Get ready, he’d said. I hefted my suitcase, clapped my hat on my head. Time to go visit my family.

The conductor came back to open the door for me as the train slowed. He couldn’t even look me in the eye. He mumbled something that sounded like “Be careful,” and then we were rumbling slowly past a platform, and I was stepping out into the air.

I felt a jarring, sickening sensation of the world rising up to meet me. I staggered, let go of the suitcase, and hit one knee on the wood of the platform, the train still trundling behind me. I crawled away from it, feeling like I’d been in an accident. It was moving faster than I’d thought, when I was on it.

I told myself not to be weak. I made sure I hadn’t scraped my knee; I didn’t want anyone around here to see my blood. I got to my feet, checked to make sure my suitcase hadn’t popped open in the fall, and took a moment to get my bearings.

The platform was deserted. Beyond it the single cobbled street of the town bent like an elbow out into the ocean, with houses lining the crook. Along the water were docks where fishing boats bobbed up and down at their moorings. The sun was going down behind the tree-covered hills, bathing the town in alternating stripes of red light and shadow. Three young boys knelt in the street, their hand-me-down coats straining threadbare over their backs.

I found myself watching them closely, my eyes locked on them. They were using a stick to try to loosen one of the cobblestones. One of them looked up and saw me, and froze. I watched him reach down as though he thought if he moved slowly enough I wouldn’t see him. His dirty fingers scrabbled at the edges of the stone until he held it in his hand. I saw his fingers clamp shut around it, and I saw the muscles in his shoulder begin to tense. I tensed, too, sinking down lower, ready to duck or run forward. It was like he knew me. Like he knew what I’d done.

“You there!”

An old man hobbled out of a store, waving a walking stick. The boys scattered, tearing off across the cobbles.

I shuddered like someone being woken up from a dream. The man brandished the stick halfheartedly after the boys, but it seemed like he’d already forgotten them as he turned to look at me up on the platform, shielding his eyes to see me more clearly. I clambered down to meet him. He was bent at the shoulder, his blue eyes cloudy with age, and he wore a clerical collar.

“Ah, young Eleanor,” he said.

“I . . . I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I know you.”

“Father Thomas,” he said. “Your grandmother didn’t want to introduce you to me until you were older.” He had the same sharp, staccato accent as the man on the train. “But I know about all of you.” He winked. I blushed, not quite knowing why, wondering what it was exactly that he knew.

“Well, thank you for . . . chasing them off.”

“My job. Pastor of Saint Anthony in Winterport. Here to help the lost.” He chuckled a little to himself. “Do you need directions up to the house?”

“I think I remember. Who were they?”

“Oh, them? Kids from town,” he said. “They don’t understand that you’re safe enough. I suspect there’s something instinctual that makes ’em want to throw rocks at Zarrins.”

His matter-of-factness chilled me. But I’d known my family was dangerous, so why was I surprised that other people knew it, too?

“I don’t think they’re expecting me,” I said. “Will that be a problem?”

“The Zarrins have never much liked unexpected company,” he said. “But they are expecting you. Your grandma sent Margaret down this morning with a note, asked me to greet you.”

I hadn’t seen that coming.

“I’ll walk you as far as the church,” he said.

He offered to take my suitcase, but I said I’d manage. He hitched along beside me, leaning on his cane. The whole way I thought I spotted people watching us—a twitch of lace curtains at a window, a rustle as though someone had just ducked behind a hedge. It was almost funny. But then when we got to the weathered clapboard church, and he went away up the path and in through the door, nothing about it seemed funny anymore. I was alone.

At the edge of town, the road went nearly straight up a steep incline into a copse of silver birch. The climb was hard; my suitcase banged against my already bruised leg, and I started carrying it in my arms. The wind curled through the trees, blowing through my uniform until I couldn’t stop shivering.

A car crawled along behind me for a while, and then passed me at a crest when the road widened. At school, cars would honk at us as we walked in groups; boys would lean out and ask us if we wanted a ride and the nuns would yell at them to leave us alone. Not here. I wondered if the driver recognized me, or just the direction I was walking.

I came to the place where the road forked. To the right, it became a bridge that spanned a narrow sound and traveled onward up the coast. To the left, a dirt road that darted directly up the steep slope into the deep woods. Trees made a tunnel overhead. It was beautiful up there, in the darkening forest, but I sensed that it was not a place to be caught alone at night. I bent my knees and adjusted my gait to move silently, then crept forward.

Birds sang here, and wild creatures rustled in the bushes. My ears pricked at the small sounds. The geography settled into place around me. To my right down the tree-lined slope: a streambed that carried a torrent of meltwater every spring, eventually pouring off a cliff into the sea. A little to one side of that, there was a line in the woods where it transitioned from birch to aspen. And a little farther up the path, visible in glimpses as I climbed steadily, was the front lawn. I rounded a bend, and the trees fell away, and all that remained was the house.

It loomed over the landscape. Towers and porches and balconies and bay windows. Story after story of decorative gingerbreading, crown molding, sunburst emblems, recessed niches, and high gables, and all of it covered in gray scalloped shingles, like scales, and at the very top of the highest tower, the creaking weathervane in the shape of a running rabbit. It was hard to look at: not all of it fit in my view at once, even after I took a few steps back. I realized that now, it scared me. It was too much. It felt oppressive, a giant squatting at the top of the world.

I stared the house down, willing it to blink its windows first. And then I took a few quick steps across the narrow band of lawn, planted my foot deliberately on the first step, and launched myself up to the door.

It was black. Not painted: black wood, with twisted carvings and a brass horsehead with a ring clenched in its teeth. I lifted the ring and let it fall.

No answer for a long moment. Behind me the wind ran up my spine and made me shiver. I reached for the knob and threw the door open.

A moan filled the air, a window open somewhere that pulled the air from the door through the house, turning the front hall into a throat. As soon as I stepped forward into the house, suction yanked the door shut behind me and the sound of the ocean sloughing against the cliffs on the far side of the house faded to a whisper. Other than that, there was no sound, except for somewhere down the hall, a heavy clock ticking.

I looked around with heart pumping, my hands locked around my suitcase. The entry hall soared two and a half stories, the ceiling lost in darkness somewhere overhead, the rails of the second floor lined with unlit post lamps. The central staircase snaked down in two streams from the upper floors, joining in the middle and unfurling into the front hall, covered in carpet the faded red of a tongue. The walnut wainscoting gleamed, but the baseboards were scratched and scarred, and the wallpaper, printed with scenes of men hunting stags, lay tattered in places. An age-spotted mirror stood propped on a narrow hall table that also held a cut glass dish of desiccated peppermints. The walls were lined with portraits of dim figures, paintings of sprawling landscapes, lovingly rendered still lifes of animal haunches and goblets overflowing with wine. Things I remembered but didn’t recognize, as though I’d seen them in a movie, or a dream.

I felt suddenly dizzy. I wanted to sit down, but what should I sit on—the chair carved in the shape of a grinning devil? A long bench lined with a dozen briefcases with deep gouges in the leather? A pile of twine-tied packages all stamped with fragile and a picture of a skull? Maybe I should just keep moving forward. There were the stairs. Somewhere, two stories up, was my childhood bedroom, and maybe if I could make it in there, shut the door, I would be transformed back into someone who belonged here. But that seemed like a long way to go on legs that were longing to carry me down—to the floor, or ideally back to town, to the train, to safety. But there was no train.

I couldn’t leave now, I told myself. Where would I even go?

The front hall was lined with portraits. I got close to them and studied them in turn, trying to see who I could remember. The largest was an oil painting of a squat, grinning young man with impressive sideburns, holding a team of white horses by their reins while they reared and foamed and rolled their eyes. My grandfather, I thought, but not the doting, laughing man I remembered—he looked fiendish. Next to him, an array of men who looked like him but with varying expressions: a skittish man in a red sweater who must have been my father. A sleek boy with a jagged smile in the same sweater as my father’s picture, but faded and frayed. And there were women here, too, all with sharp cheekbones, olive skin, dark eyes, nothing like my flat, wide-mouthed face. I scanned the whole room and could not find a single photograph of me.

I closed my eyes and steadied myself on the newel post at the base of the stairs. And then from farther back into the house, I heard a voice call out, “Eleanor! Is that you?”

I’d know that voice anywhere: it was clear and gentle, like the bell on a buoy. It cut through my fear and touched me. Mother. She used to sing to me, when I was little. And she was here.

“Where are you?” I called.

“The back garden, dear.” She sounded happy. “Come through the kitchen, it’s fastest!”

Mother. She had soft hands and she’d let me braid her long hair when I was a child. Suddenly my reservations left me, and all I wanted to do was see her again.

I quickly followed the hallway to the door that led to the kitchen. I was about to be back with my mother, and then everything would be alright. I opened the door, and as it swung open, I realized someone was standing there, waiting for me to open it.

I’d forgotten about Aunt Margaret.

She stared straight at me from under her ragged tangle of hair. She looked like the women in the portraits, but wilder: sallow skin, bags under her eyes, her clothes covered in grease stains. She frowned at me and muttered something I couldn’t make out. She didn’t like to be stared at, I remembered, and she didn’t like to be spoken to. I could work around this. I averted my eyes and held very still. Slowly, she shuffled back a few paces from the door. “Mother?” I called out again, more tentatively.

“Just follow my voice, dear!”

I edged around Margaret. In my childhood memories she was somehow lovable, always humming a tune. She muttered to herself as I skirted around her through the dark kitchen, across its brick floor and past the big stone oven blackened with years of soot, to the old farmhouse-style back door. The top half was already propped open. I slipped out through the bottom half and shut it behind me, penning Margaret in the kitchen.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the house, so I was blinded at first when I stepped out into the sun. Mother gasped, then said, “My little girl!”

As my eyes adjusted, I saw the shapes in the back garden more clearly. A tall, narrow old woman in a faded black dress, a man in a suit, a woman sitting in what looked like a large iron washtub. And behind them, a table set with plates and glassware and trimmed with faded bunting. A party?

“Hullo, Eleanor,” said the man. He was older than in his portrait, but I knew he must be my father. I stepped closer, but he didn’t reach out to hug me, just looked at me curiously for a long while. Finally, I put out a hand, and he shook it dazedly.

“Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said. I was already looking past her, looking for the voice that had called to me earlier. But when I really saw my mother, I gasped.

She was wearing a thin robe, drenched with water. Half of her face was just like mine. I recognized my high forehead, my profile. But as she turned to look at me I saw her other side: an eyeless, earless mass of red polyps that ran all the way down her body until they disappeared into the water of the tub. All of them were straining toward me, as though they could see me, as though they wanted to reach out and grasp me and suck me into the mass. I stumbled back and caught myself on the porch railing.

Her one eyebrow shot up, her half of a mouth opening in dismay. I forced myself to smile, but she reached out her good hand and took a damp towel from the edge of the tub and smoothed it protectively over the inhuman side of her face.

I knew I should go and hug her. I knew that I used to. That when I was little, I’d loved her. But now all I could think about was the feeling of those things squirming across my face.

“Hello, Mother,” I said, trying to sound breezy, like the girls at school. But they always said mummy, or mama. I couldn’t imagine what that would sound like in my mouth.

“I told them we should throw you a little party,” Mother said. “It’s been so long.”

“How did you know I was coming?”

“I saw you,” said Grandma Persephone. And when she spoke, I realized that my eye had been avoiding her in the way that it was still avoiding Mother. I forced myself to turn and take in the woman who had sent me away from home all those years ago.

Her hair was milk-white, like mine, and had been since she was young—a family trait. She towered over me, taller than a woman ought to be by her age. Hers was the original face that had spawned all the women in the portraits: her features bonier, crueler, her nose more hooked, her eyes more sunken. I swallowed hard.

“Grandmother,” I said. In my mind it sounded dignified. But it came out softer than I’d expected. Like a question.

“You made it here, I see.”

I wondered if she was angry at me. She’d told me, in letter after letter over the years, to stay put, and I hadn’t. Well, I’d better get this over with. I cleared my throat.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “Something happened.”

Her eyebrows shot up, and she looked angry for a moment. “Not now.” She glanced out across the fields. “The others are coming. They want to say hello to you.”

As if in answer, from the woods came a long howl.

“That will be your grandfather,” she said.

But it wasn’t just him—it was three voices, mingling on the breeze. I was surprised to realize I recognized them. The long vowels of Grandpa Miklos, the sharp yips of Luma, Rhys’s guttural bark. But a part of them felt different now. I used to hear that sound and run to the door. Now I stood frozen in place like a rabbit, my eyes scanning the tree line, dreading what might come out.

“Quite alright?” Grandma Persephone asked. My throat was too dry to speak.

It was spring dusk. They were nothing more than smears of light and shadow among the trees. If they came for my throat there would be no way I could stop them. The sound of their voices made my chest ache with longing, but my legs wanted to run. A dangerous combination, to want something so badly and also be so afraid. I felt that hunger open up inside me again, the same one I’d felt gripping Lucy Spencer by the hair—

I realized I’d shut my eyes, and when I forced them open again, three shapes had broken free of the tree line, ambling along upright, laughing and joking and straightening clothing. One of the shapes, a young man tugging on a red sweater, saw me and started into a run across the lawn. He vaulted the low stone wall, rushed me, grabbed me, and heaved me high into the air. Against my will my body went limp, preparing for death.

“Ellie!”

He caught me up and held me out to look at me. My feet dangled in empty air. I still couldn’t draw breath.

“Rhys, put her down.” Grandma Persephone’s lips were pursed, but I could see the smile twitching around the edges. She thought this was funny. I couldn’t believe it.

“She likes it,” Rhys said. “Don’t you?”

“Please put me down.”

He looked wounded, but he lowered me to the ground. As soon as my feet touched down I backed away. My ribs ached where he’d held me.

“Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said, “this is your cousin Rhys. A college man, when he bothers to show up to his classes. Popular with the ladies, or so I’ve heard.” Rhys’s chest puffed up. “And clearly, as you can see, a brute with no manners.” She said it affectionately, but I didn’t think it was funny at all.

“She knows me.” He grinned at me. “Don’t you, Ellie?”

“Of course.” I tried to infuse my voice with warmth. He felt dangerous.

“I knew it!” He moved forward as though he wanted to scoop me up again, but stopped himself short. “Every time I’m home I ask Where’s Ellie, and Grandma says—”

“She’s been at boarding school,” Grandma Persephone said. “I know that, Grandma. Where’s she been at Christmas?”

“Rhys, who’s got the meat?” she asked.

“Grandpa.”

“Why don’t you go help him with that?”

Rhys nodded, then sprinted back toward the other two figures making their way across the lawn. One was an old man who tottered slowly, the other a blond girl who kept pace.

“If he’s my cousin,” I said, “who’s his mother?”

“Margaret. And that’s your sister there, and your Grandpa Miklos,” Grandma Persephone said, behind me. She said it quietly, like a stage manager feeding me my lines.

“I know that,” I said. I watched Rhys catch up to them. He took the sack from the old man, leaped back over the wall, and opened the gate for him. The sack dropped to the ground with a leaden thud. As she stepped through the gate, the girl glanced up, and although I knew it was her, I recognized my sister for the first time. And she was the first thing I saw that didn’t frighten me. She’d grown up, but she still looked like a movie actress, with her wide, bright eyes, cherubic face, and soft hair the color of a star. She ran toward me and wrapped her arms around me, and from her clothes came the familiar smell of pine forest and mail-ordered perfume. Luma. My sister, my best friend. I’d written her probably a hundred letters and she’d never written me back, but now I was here, and she had me.

“Eleanor!” she said into my cheek. I let her hug me, and for a moment, things felt normal. Then she pulled back and grinned cheerily at me with her mouthful of sharp teeth. Strands of bloody flesh still clung between them, and her breath smelled gamey. I kept my smile fixed as she stroked my cheek with a fingernail caked in blood.

“Luma,” I said. “I’ve missed you.”

“And you!”

“I have so much to tell you,” I said. “I—”

“Mother,” Luma said, “what’s in your bath? It smells incredible.”

“Sage.”

“Heaven.” Luma sat down on the edge of Mother’s tub with a sigh, stroked the water, and splashed some of it across her face. I couldn’t quite believe that after eight years away, she hadn’t even let me finish my sentence.

All around me were little domestic scenes: Luma sitting on the edge of the garden tub, Father listening sheepishly while Rhys talked about the hunting they’d done, Grandma Persephone tapping Grandpa Miklos on the chest with one bony finger. “You forgot your cane,” she said.

“I don’t need it on four legs.”

“You need it coming back.”

“Ehhhh . . .” He waved a hand. “I don’t like it. It makes me feel old.”

“You are old.”

He slung an arm around her shoulders, and she bent her knees to take his weight. As she moved to his side I got a look at his face. It was the face I remembered most vividly from childhood: those kind, dark eyes, those soft lines in his skin, his bushy eyebrows, his broad nose. But I didn’t feel the way I used to when I looked at him. I was afraid.

“Miklos,” Grandma Persephone said. “Don’t you want to say hello to Eleanor? She’s home.”

He grinned as he turned toward me. But then he sniffed the air, his grin faded, and his head snapped up to lock onto his target. His eyes focused on mine, and as they did, his shoulders dropped down, relaxing but also . . . preparing.

I felt suddenly cold. Grandpa wasn’t like Rhys or Luma or Father. He was older and came from somewhere less civilized. He wasn’t seeing Eleanor, his granddaughter. He was seeing a young woman named Eleanor who had suddenly found herself at an isolated manor house. Someone no one would miss if she disappeared on a spring evening.

He took a step toward me. I took half a step back, praying my foot wouldn’t catch on a stone, praying I wouldn’t falter or fall.

Grandma Persephone saw it, too. She snapped her fingers under his nose. “Miklos. Miklos!”

He shook his head and looked a little dreamy.

“It is good to see you, my . . . darling,” he said. “It has been too long.”

I nodded, waiting for my heart to stop racing.

Grandma Persephone had him by one arm. I could see her fingernails digging into his jacket. “Let’s toast,” she said.

They all turned toward the table and took up flutes of champagne. Someone put one into my hand.

“To our Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said, and they clinked glasses and drank. I sipped.

I’d pictured a time like this every night for years, until the image got threadbare and worn. My family, welcoming me back, thrilled to see me, as though I had never left. And now that I had it, it was wrong. Or I was wrong.

The rest of them quickly fell to chatting, and I let myself sidle out of the way. At school, the easiest way to get out of things was just to stop existing. I watched them for a while, and then Grandma Persephone detached herself and drifted back to stand near me.

“You’ll want to apologize to your mother once you’ve settled in,” she said. “You were a little rude, but I’m sure she’ll understand that you’re just nervous. Which, by the way, is not something you should show your grandfather, either. If something runs, he has to chase.”

“I wouldn’t have been afraid if you hadn’t sent me away.”

It was out of my mouth before I could stop it, and after I said it, I glowed hot with indignation. She studied me, and I studied her back, looking all over her face for any trace of remorse for what she’d done to me, for sending me away, for letting me be afraid. Nothing. I realized she was curious about me, that she might have known I’d come back, but now that I was here, she didn’t know exactly what I’d do next.

“I felt like that, once,” she said at last.

“I’m sorry?”

“After my son died,” she said. “The first Rhys. I looked at your grandfather, and I forgot everything that made him my family. I just saw a monster.”

I looked around at the gathering. How could she see anything else?

“Give yourself time,” she said, “to let your eyes adjust.”

I glanced around at my family. They’d clumped together, laughing, drinking champagne. Aside from a few glances at me, they looked like they’d already forgotten I was here, that I was the reason for the party. Evening fell across the lawn as my sister still perched on the edge of the tub. Her long, sharp teeth, the ones that couldn’t retract like everyone else’s, glinted in the light of the rising moon. Father and Grandpa Miklos were looking conspiratorially at the bag on the ground.

“What’s for dinner?” Father asked Rhys. “Show me what you caught.”

Rhys grabbed the sack and pulled out a brace of young rabbits by the ears. Their bodies swung limply from their broken necks. Their white throats were pink with blood.

Maybe my eyes were adjusting, I thought, since everything seemed to be getting darker around me. And then I fainted.

TWO

I woke up in a dim room. For a moment I thought I was back at Saint Brigid’s, and I was relieved. Everything that had happened had been a terrible dream. Now I would wake up for morning Mass. I’d eat toast in the dining hall alone. Maybe I’d spend the morning reading with Sister Katherine. It was June, and everyone but me would be gone on summer vacations at last, so there would be no one to bother me.

But the bed underneath me was too soft, almost saggy. And there was a weight on me, pressing down, heavier than a blanket.

I glanced down, then screamed, instantly awake. Sprawled across my legs was a dead—something, big and covered in brown fur. I scrambled backward until I hit the headboard, and I stayed there, breathing hard, until I could bring myself to look more closely. A groundhog. No blood on it, just dead. A prank, I guessed. Probably Rhys. And I remembered all at once where I was.

Rhys was a beast. Was he trying to frighten me away? He could try his best. This wasn’t the first time someone had put something horrible in my bed.

I slithered out from under the covers, stumbled around the room until I found the curtains, and tugged them open.

Light flooded the room, and I blinked for a moment, stunned. My window overlooked the high cliffs and beyond that the ocean, sunlit and deep blue. I opened the window and felt an ache under my ribs. The smell of the sea called to me. I shut my eyes and sighed. I loved it here, in this place. I couldn’t let Rhys scare me away.

I went to the bed and picked up the top sheet by the corners. I heaved the groundhog to the window and rolled it out. It hit the lawn with a thud.

There, that was a little better. I shook out the sheet and risked a look around.

My room at school had been austere: white walls, two narrow beds, one perpetually empty because no one would room with me. This room was its opposite, so packed with things and life that it was almost hard to look at. It had wallpaper printed with tiny flowers, an enormous black wardrobe carved with grinning faces buried in sprays of oak leaves, a cheery pink-and-red rag rug, a chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, heavy curtains of faded pink velvet with gold tassels, a spindly-legged desk crouched in one corner, and a dollhouse in the shape of the house itself, the roof caved in, as though someone had stepped on it. My suitcase was propped up by the wardrobe. There was a little armchair with a rabbit sitting in it, and my heart raced until I realized it was a stuffed toy. There were sheets of paper pinned to the walls, page-sized pieces that flapped a little in the breeze from the open window. Some had come unpinned and fluttered to the floor.

They were poems, their edges showing the rough scissor-work of a young child. They must have been cut out of a book. I leaned forward to read one.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

My poem, the one I knew most of the lines to, the one I mouthed to myself late at night in my dormitory room at Saint Brigid’s. I thought that I’d read it for the first time at thirteen, behind a shelf in our school’s little library. I checked it out so many times that Sister Katherine had finally let me keep it. It was the only book I’d grabbed when I hastily packed my suitcase and ran for the train station. But here it was, something a much younger me had loved, too. How could I have forgotten?

Downstairs, plates clattered and people spoke in hushed voices. I should go down there and say something. I should try again. They were all I had, after all. I stopped in front of the mirror; they’d put me to bed fully dressed, so I was still in my school uniform. I smoothed my collar down. Close enough.

When I descended the stairs and came to the dining room, I hesitated at the door. Then Mother saw me. She was sitting in a barrel, a gauzy robe draped over her and trailing in the water. She turned toward me and smiled winningly with the side of her face that had teeth.

“Eleanor!” she said. “You’re awake. We were so worried after last night.”

“I feel much better now.”

“Come have some breakfast!”

I tried not to look tentative as I stepped across the threshold. I remembered Persephone’s words: If you run, he has to chase. So I tried to look confident as I turned toward Miklos, but he didn’t see me. His face was a snout, buried in his breakfast, licking it up from the plate. Bits of meat and egg flew in all directions. At his elbow, Rhys and Luma were fighting over a last slice of thick undercooked bacon, until finally it ripped apart between them and Luma fell backward into Father, jostling his elbow while he cut his meat into little squares. Rhys looked up at me with an expectant grin. Determined that he wouldn’t scare me, I stared impassively until the grin vanished. After his eyes dropped to his plate I let my gaze wander, and realized that there was someone else at the table, someone whose back was turned to me.

“Arthur,” said Grandma Persephone. “You remember Eleanor?”

And the man whose back was turned stood up, unfolding himself from the chair in front of me.

He was not astoundingly tall, but his thinness accentuated his height. He looked neither young nor old—he had no hair on his head, but also no wrinkles, aside from deep pleats in his lips that made him look stern. He wore a black suit in an old style with a celluloid collar and a pair of old-fashioned dark glasses, the kind with lenses on the sides, obscuring his eyes. His skin looked almost bloodless, but he didn’t seem sick. I noticed he kept one hand on the back of his chair, and a silver-handled cane was resting not far from his feet.

He smiled without opening his mouth. “I suppose the real question is: Do you remember me?”

“. . . Mr. Knox?” I ventured.

“Please, call me Arthur.”

I remembered someone of about his shape from my childhood. A dinner guest for the adults who had little to say to children. He drove an old Model T and sometimes parked it in our carriage house. At the time he’d seemed to me to be impossibly old and fusty, except when he’d—

“You used to play piano,” I said, realization dawning. “I think you might have taught me how to play.”

Grandma Persephone glanced over at him sharply, suddenly. His back was to her, so he didn’t see it. I remembered sitting next to him on the bench, learning scales on a sunny afternoon.

“I might have,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

How was he so young? He didn’t look like he’d aged a day since I’d left. But maybe I’d been wrong back then; maybe he was just one of those young people who seemed old.

He pulled out my chair for me, and when I sat in it, he settled me in closer to the table. I felt less afraid with him here. Not because he would protect me, but because he’d survived so long in the company of my family. That meant it was possible.

I liked him instantly. There was something delicate about him that made me want to hold him too tightly, dig fingernails into him, bite into him to test his firmness. At the same time, he felt cool, self-contained, like my favorite teachers at Saint Brigid’s. I wanted to impress him.

“What brings you by today?” I asked, hoping it sounded natural, the kind of question that adult people ask one another.

“Your grandma didn’t get her taxes done on time.”

Grandma Persephone rolled her eyes. “I pay them enough that you’d think they could wait.”

“And, of course, you’ll stay for dinner,” Father said.

Mr. Knox—Arthur—smiled tightly. “Of course.”

I tried to concentrate on my breakfast, but I was aware of him in a way that reminded me of the feeling of someone standing just behind you. But every time I turned to try to talk to him, someone else already had his attention. Luma asked him about his car; Rhys wanted to show him how he could throw his spoon as high as the ceiling and then catch it in his teeth. Even Margaret, on her trips back and forth from the table to the kitchen, stopped muttering and looked at him fondly. Every time someone talked to him, he was courteous, charming. He didn’t eat, but sipped at a cup of coffee with a wry smile flickering around the corners of his mouth. At one point he saw me looking at him and, for a second, turned that smile on me, and I felt like someone had held a match up to the edge of me and lit me on fire. But when I started to open my mouth, Father was already asking him when they could play billiards.

Finally, Grandpa Miklos pushed back his chair. “I am ready for some hunting.”

“Father, you hunted yesterday,” my father said. “Don’t you think you’ll wear yourself out?”

“The day I can’t hunt, I am not Miklos. Who’s coming?” Grandpa glanced hopefully at me.

“I can’t,” I said. In the woods he’d kill me for sure.

“You still can’t become the wolf? I hoped you would grow into it.”

“Miklos, hush,” Grandma Persephone said. He shrugged and made a face at her. She giggled like a girl.

“I’m going to stay in today,” Luma said. “You go, Daddy. Keep Grandpa company.”

“Any requests?”

“Postman?” Luma said, and everyone but me laughed. “But really, anything. You know I don’t mind.”

“I’ll come.” Rhys stood up and stretched, flexing his shoulders until his sweater strained across his chest and pulled up to show his flat belly downed in dark hair. “See you later, Arthur.”

“Luma, why don’t you want to go with your cousin?” Grandma Persephone asked.

Luma laughed and combed her hair behind her ear with a long-taloned hand.

“I want to spend time with Eleanor,” she said.

The hunters—Father, Grandpa Miklos, and Rhys—left, jostling their way out of the dining room. Persephone half waved at them before turning to Arthur. “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

Arthur picked up his cane and rested his weight on it while he waited for her. I looked at his legs, wondering what ailed him, or if he was simply older than I’d thought. He saw me looking and gave me a covert smile. How had I not remembered him? Maybe I’d been too young to notice someone so subtle. Now, he was all I could see.

“I’m going upstairs to play,” Luma said. “Do you want to come with me?”

“Aren’t you a little old for that?” I said without thinking, wanting to sound mature in front of Arthur. But Luma scowled at me, and I instantly felt sorry.

“If you think so, you don’t have to come,” she said. She turned and flounced up the stairs.

“We’ll see you later, Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said. And then she and Arthur were gone, and I was alone.

I thought about going up and apologizing to Luma. But what would I say? That I’d snapped at her to impress our grandmother’s accountant? It sounded silly, even to me. And she barely knew me now. What would she even say, if I tried to apologize? What if she didn’t care?

I tried to forget the whole conversation, and looked around the house for things to amuse myself. But as the morning turned into afternoon in the big empty house, I realized I was bored. I sat and read a book in the front parlor for a while, a dark red room with a big fireplace and heavy rugs, and played chess with myself until I realized I couldn’t remember all the rules. I pulled the dust cloth off of the piano and tried out some scales.

I could still smell the sea on the breeze and a part of me wanted to go to the water, but I was afraid of it—I hadn’t swum in eight years. Maybe the ocean was now just another thing that wanted to kill me. And once from the woods I heard a series of quick barks, and then a wild creature screamed in a way that reminded me it wasn’t safe to leave the house.

Finally, I went up to my room, where I squinted at myself in the fly-specked mirror and tried to make myself change my shape, like Rhys and Luma did. What did it feel like, to change? How would I know if I was close?

I thought of a way of making up with Luma. I crept down the hall and knocked on her door. “Hello?” I called out. I opened the door a crack and saw her sitting on a low chair with her back to the door. “Luma, I have an important question and I really need your help.”

She didn’t turn around from her vanity, where she sat brushing her hair. But she nodded at herself in the mirror, and I knew she was pleased.

“Well,” she said. “Don’t stand in the door. Come in.”

While my room seemed like storage for old furniture, hers was all matched: white bed, white dresser, white vanity with an enormous mirror. That whole wall was lined with mirrors of all shapes and sizes. There was a copy of Rebecca tented open on her bed, and a smattering of lipsticks around it, and Jane Eyre bookmarked with a sheet of false eyelashes on the bedside table on top of a tattered book that said Birds of North America. At Saint Brigid’s you weren’t supposed to read more than one book at a time. It was considered lax. I sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out how to ask her what it felt like to change your shape.

“It’s a bit like turning yourself inside out,” Luma said, after I tried asking three or four different ways. “Or like turning your insides into a disguise, and then tucking your disguise into your insides.”

“It’s like a disguise?” I said. “It seems a little more complicated than that.”

“It’s . . .” She left the brushing and rummaged in the toy box she still kept beside her bed. I felt embarrassed for her. She came out with a cloth doll in a long dress.

“Flip up her skirt,” she ordered, and, still not understanding, I did. Underneath was another head and torso of a doll. The skirt, turned inside out, was a different color. The doll, upside down, a different woman.

“It’s like that,” she said. “Only faster.”

I looked at Luma, in her white slip with her layers of blotted pink and red lipsticks staining her sharp teeth. I tried to imagine where the other creature was.

“Why does it bother you?” she asked. “It didn’t used to. You could always keep up anyway.” She pulled up the sleeve of her robe and showed me a ring of white scars on her forearm. “You bit harder than any of us, too.”

The scars stared at me accusingly, as pearly as a set of baby teeth. I wanted to put my own teeth up against them, to prove by size and angle that they weren’t mine.

“Oh, Luma,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m fine!” she said, and I felt even worse. What kind of sister had I been? “It wasn’t so bad. At least you don’t have teeth like us.”

“I guess I take after Mother.”

She laughed. “But she’s so quiet!” she said. “You know, I think she said something once about you being a bit like her mother. And then I asked her what she meant and she said she couldn’t tell me.”

“Her mother?” “Our other grandmother, silly. She lives in France, I think. Mother writes a letter every year at Christmas.”

“Have you seen her?” I felt a little kindling of hope. “Maybe I am like her.”

“I always imagined she’d be like Mother, only all over,” Luma said. I winced.

From downstairs I heard a door creak open. Grandma Persephone’s voice filtered up through the front hall, and Arthur’s, too. I’d forgotten he was going to eat with us.

“Can I borrow something pretty to wear?” I asked. “And maybe you could do my hair?”

She looked at me strangely then. “Why?”

“I just want to try something different,” I said. “I’ve worn a uniform for a long time now.”

She tilted her head. “That’s sad,” she said. “Sit down.”

She arranged me in front of her mirror and began taking down my hair. It was nearly the same color as hers, but somehow hers was lustrous, and mine a faded grayish white that made me look old.

“What’s this?” she asked, touching the back of my neck. It stung.

“Ow!” I said.

“It looks like someone pulled out a chunk of your hair back here.” She looked me over. “And you’re bruised, too. What happened to you?”

I thought of Lucy Spencer gripping my hair, yanking on it, trying to hold me back. My face burned. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I got in a fight at school.”

She tutted.

“Well, you’re home now,” she said. “If anyone comes after you, I’ll eat them up.” And then she giggled and hummed as she began brushing my hair. In her own room, she seemed wise, knowing. She was a few years older than me, but we’d always switched like this, taking turns being the older sister. I used to like it, but now I was suddenly unsure of my footing.

“Let’s make you lovely,” she said.

I didn’t feel lovely, even in the frilly dress I borrowed from her. On her, I’m sure it looked elegant, voluptuous; it sagged on me like a sack, so that I looked like a little girl in a nightgown, and I ended up putting my school uniform back on. But my hair was nice the way she’d done it, in braids coiled around my head. She made me turn around and started dabbing creams onto her wrist, and then smudging them onto my cheeks and eyes. As she worked, a savory smell drifted up the stairs from the kitchen. They’d caught something, then.

“Why didn’t you come home sooner?” she asked, tilting my mouth open and swiping a little lipstick on with her pinky finger. She frowned at it and reached for a handkerchief to wipe it off. “No. You’re such a strange color. Almost green.”

“They wouldn’t let me come home,” I said.

“Funny,” she said. “Grandma told me you were too busy.”

She licked her hand and used the spit to smooth back the flyaways at my hairline. I winced. “She lied. I wasn’t busy.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see why she had to be lying. Maybe you were too busy and you just didn’t know it.”

“Busy eating plain toast for breakfast? Busy trying to make friends so the other girls wouldn’t pour water on my bed while I was sleeping? I learned Latin, I suppose, but I could have done that here.” I sighed. “I don’t know.”

Luma’s eyes went wide. “That sounds awful. Why didn’t you kill them?”

I started. “Because that’s wrong!” I said, and then thought of Lucy, and felt a sick guilt in my stomach. “They were terrible, but not that terrible.”

She cocked her head to one side and seemed about to say something, when Grandma Persephone called from downstairs that it was time for dinner.

“She should get a bell,” I said, as we made our way to the staircase. “There’s no way everyone heard that.”

From behind us I heard a clattering of toenails on bare wood, and in a blur, Rhys came rocketing down the stairs past us on four legs, his black pelt glistening as he leaped clear over the last several steps. He skidded around a corner into the hall closet below, and emerged a few moments later on two legs, pulling a sweater on over his head and then reaching down to button his pants.

And then he did something strange. He stopped in front of the speckled mirror in the front hall and licked his palm. Carefully, he smoothed his gleaming black hair back from his forehead, the way Luma had just done to me. He turned left and right, watching his own reflection, rolling his shoulders back and sticking his hands in his pockets just so before he crossed the threshold into the dining room.

As soon as he was out of sight, I turned to Luma. “I don’t remember him ever caring what he looked like,” I said. It wasn’t in his character. Rhys was a predator, sleek and unstoppable. It was strange to see him pouting at himself.

“I don’t know who he’s fooling,” Luma said. “He’s been trying to impress Arthur ever since he came home for the summer.”

“Impress him? Why?”

“If you ask me, it’s very childish,” she said, and she flounced down after him. But I noticed that when she came to the hall mirror, she stopped, too. I hung back, watching as she curled a strand of hair around the tip of her finger, and then unspooled it so that it hung down alongside her face.

I was the last one in, and everyone else had already taken seats: Grandma Persephone at the head, with Miklos next to her, which surprised me since I’d assumed they’d sit in the same place every time. Mother was again in her barrel at the foot of the table. Luma and Rhys jostled for a seat opposite Arthur, and in the chaos I slipped into the seat beside him, unnoticed. Margaret came in bearing an enormous tray loaded with cuts of rare venison: loins, steaks, something I couldn’t identify. Grandpa Miklos speared it with the carving fork and brandished it at me. “Little one, you should have the heart.”

I froze. The heart on the fork quivered, and Grandpa Miklos looked confused, then sad. Finally, Rhys snatched it off the end of the fork with both hands. Grandpa grunted indulgently. And with that, dinnertime descended.

The air filled with the gnashing of teeth and the clink of fork tines on china. Grandpa Miklos shoved his whole face into the dish, scarfing up the tender bits and licking the plate clean with a tongue that seemed too big for his mouth. I ate slowly, the way they’d taught me in school, and watched the carnage from the corner of my eye. It was a little easier than breakfast had been, but I still felt that I could be next.

I glanced sideways at Arthur. He seemed to be smiling a little. I realized that he wasn’t eating, just pushing food around his plate and occasionally slipping pieces of it into a napkin in his lap. I felt mortified.

“I’m sorry they’re like this,” I whispered to him over the chomps and satisfied snarls. “This would put anyone off eating.”

He turned his head to me, looking perplexed.