Rose had laughed at that and caressed Andi’s cheek. The touch of her fingers caused a hot little worm of excitement in Andi’s stomach. Crazy, but there it was. “You’ve got a twinkle, don’t you? I think you’ll be fine.”
Maybe, but as she lay here, Andi was no longer excited, only scared. News stories slipped through her mind, ones about bodies found in ditches, bodies found in wooded clearings, bodies found at the bottom of dry wells. Women and girls. Almost always women and girls. It wasn’t Rose who scared her—not exactly—and there were other women here, but there were also men.
Rose knelt beside her. The glare of the headlights should have turned her face into a harsh and ugly landscape of blacks and whites, but the opposite was true: it only made her more beautiful. Once again she caressed Andi’s cheek. “No fear,” she said. “No fear.”
She turned to one of the other women, a pallidly pretty creature Rose called Silent Sarey, and nodded. Sarey nodded back and went into Rose’s monster RV. The others, meanwhile, began to form a circle around the lawn recliner. Andi didn’t like that. There was something sacrificial about it.
“No fear. Soon you’ll be one of us, Andi. One with us.”
Unless, Rose thought, you cycle out. In which case, we’ll just burn your clothes in the incinerator behind the comfort stations and move on tomorrow. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But she hoped that wouldn’t happen. She liked this one, and a sleeper talent would come in handy.
Sarey returned with a steel canister that looked like a thermos bottle. She handed it to Rose, who removed the red cap. Beneath was a nozzle and a valve. To Andi the canister looked like an unlabeled can of bug spray. She thought about bolting up from the recliner and running for it, then remembered the movie theater. The hands that had reached inside her head, holding her in place.
“Grampa Flick?” Rose asked. “Will you lead us?”
“Happy to.” It was the old man from the theater. Tonight he was wearing baggy pink Bermuda shorts, white socks that climbed all the way up his scrawny shins to his knees, and Jesus sandals. To Andi he looked like Grandpa Walton after two years in a concentration camp. He raised his hands, and the rest raised theirs with him. Linked that way and silhouetted in the crisscrossing headlight beams, they looked like a chain of weird paperdolls.
“We are the True Knot,” he said. The voice coming from that sunken chest no longer trembled; it was the deep and resonant voice of a much younger and stronger man.
“We are the True Knot,” they responded. “What is tied may never be untied.”
“Here is a woman,” Grampa Flick said. “Would she join us? Would she tie her life to our life and be one with us?”
“Say yes,” Rose said.
“Y-Yes,” Andi managed. Her heart was no longer beating; it was thrumming like a wire.
Rose turned the valve on her canister. There was a small, rueful sigh, and a puff of silver mist escaped. Instead of dissipating on the light evening breeze, it hung just above the canister until Rose leaned forward, pursed those fascinating coral lips, and blew gently. The puff of mist—looking a bit like a comic-strip dialogue balloon without any words in it—drifted until it hovered above Andi’s upturned face and wide eyes.
“We are the True Knot, and we endure,” Grampa Flick proclaimed.
“Sabbatha hanti,” the others responded.
The mist began to descend, very slowly.
“We are the chosen ones.”
“Lodsam hanti,” they responded.
“Breathe deep,” Rose said, and kissed Andi softly on the cheek. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Maybe.
“We are the fortunate ones.”
“Cahanna risone hanti.”
Then, all together: “We are the True Knot, and we . . .”
But Andi lost track of it there. The silvery stuff settled over her face and it was cold, cold. When she inhaled, it came to some sort of tenebrous life and began screaming inside her. A child made of mist—whether boy or girl she didn’t know—was struggling to get away but someone was cutting. Rose was cutting, while the others stood close around her (in a knot), shining down a dozen flashlights, illuminating a slow-motion murder.
Andi tried to bolt up from the recliner, but she had no body to bolt with. Her body was gone. Where it had been was only pain in the shape of a human being. The pain of the child’s dying, and of her own.
Embrace it. The thought was like a cool cloth pressed on the burning wound that was her body. That’s the only way through.
I can’t, I’ve been running from this pain my whole life.
Perhaps so, but you’re all out of running room. Embrace it. Swallow it. Take steam or die.
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