Cauterize
3. The Chicken Coop
Gram said often that summoners make up the bones and guts and brains of humanity, the important bits. Normal people are the extras. They're the fat, the armpit hair, the impacted wisdom teeth – the bits that need trimming and removing. I still haven't formed my own opinion of the matter, but even Grampy, who was very tolerant of the average, said that normal people were always trying to dilute summoner genes with their grossness. The inferior always feel a need to wipe out the superior (page 449, A Modern History of Summoning: The Great Taint).
I suppose that it was for this reason that the International Summoning Confederation went all out of its way to start recording marriages between summoner families and the subsequent children born of these marriages. Not that it's very hard – everyone is everyone's cousin six or seven times removed nowadays, and marriages are almost always arranged. My fiancé is called Étienne. He's been mine since I was seven, and he's three years my senior, started studying literature at La Sorbonne this year. I only like him as a friend, though I'm sure I'll love him eventually, as he's very kind and patient with me. He's handsome and dresses well, too. I like his smile. I've heard love grows from silly things like that.
In any case, like all summoner girls, I'll grow up and have his children, probably more than one. I'm an only child; Gram always said it would've been better if I had lots of brothers and sisters, seeing as she was the youngest (and most talented) of fourteen, and my Grampy one of seven. Summoners are a bit behind the times in that regard, I think, though most families certainly have enough money to support numbers like that. We all come from old money (Gram holds within her heart a special hatred for the nouveau riche), and lots of it. I've never met a proper summoner – one who wasn't born by accident into a regular family – who hasn't known luxury.
In fact, there was once a time when you could start off in Swansea and get all the way to Grimsby without ever leaving Lamb property. Almost all of it was sold, of course, but we still own an estate in Sussex, flats in London and Leeds, and several plots of land in Italy, France and Belgium. The family on Gram's side owns half the state of Louisiana. The city of New Orleans practically pays us rent.
And of course there are those who dip into the underbelly of society and leech luxury from the dollars of the corrupt, the working class, from everyone, but the Lambs don't associate with them.
Not publicly, anyways.
xxx
I stay in bed and don't eat anything all of Sunday, and when Monday comes 'round, I consider suicide – I'll make a rope of designer scarves and hang myself. I have never enjoyed school. Gram wouldn't have been pleased if I got perfect marks in all my classes, so my 'above average' marks translate into near failures. Gram never went to school – she never had to, she was so good. When she was only ten years old the ISC scholars were studying her diagrams.
I'll never be like that, of course, but I do sometimes wish that I'll suddenly develop astounding ability.
Ha-ha.
They say natural ability is something you're born with, something that no amount of practice or training can change. It means you can only extend so far, that you'll only be so good. It means that even if someone like me studies every day for the rest of their life, they'll never match someone like Gram who was born and already knew, could already feel the seam where the two worlds met and understood instinctively how to reach into that second world and pull out what she needed.
Even monsters respect that.
Downstairs, Humble Dorm Head Lauren is passing out schedules. She doesn't acknowledge me, gives no indication that she recalls nearly skewering me through the neck when I give her my name and she passes me a laminated card, six by four inches. It has my name on the back and my timetable printed in miniscule letters. Monday, it says, after breakfast: group discussion.
Nat Fletcher materializes at my shoulder. "I tried," she says apologetically in way of greeting, "I tried to bring you food yesterday, but you wouldn't answer the door or anything. We had cake 'cause it was the headmistress's birthday. And you missed chapel."
I want to tell her it's not her fault, like, jeez, but I can't. Her freckles map out constellations across the bridge of her nose, distracting me. I shrug.
"You 'n' I have group discussion together this morning," she continues, glancing over my card. I didn't even realize she'd taken it. "It's kind of like group therapy, but less actively looking for problems in each other. It's like…convalescence. You kind of open up gradually as you get to know the people around you. They make us do it because we're all sociopaths with serious issues."
She lifts her eyebrows and smiles. She thinks she's made a joke, but I know it's true.
I don't want to get to know the people around me, is what I want to say, though I don't of course. Right now, I am treating Natalie Fletcher like lighthouse, while I am the captain of a ship, and Bonnie's is the sea and the fog and all the things that might lead me astray. I imagine she'll serve me well, but really, no one needs a lighthouse once they're on land.
Nat announces that she has to use the bathroom and leaves me. I don't mind. I people watch while I wait. Everyone still seems sleepy, lethargic from summer break, sluggish. Gram does not allow me the luxury of sleeping in, so I feel like the only one who is properly awake. That's fine. People mutter to themselves and mutter to each other about their schedules, I pick out the people who are in 'group discussion' with me. Athena Whiteraven looks like her mother, like a princess in the slums, lovely and trying to hide it. I hate her instantly. Helena Goldstein is with her bastard half-sister in the far corner, communicating in the way that siblings can, without words. I don't like the Goldsteins, and neither does Gram. They're power hungry, a newer family, with a father trying to muscle his way onto the ISC council. The one from the other night, Fiddle, is talking to herself, eyes rolling around in her head so I can see the whites, all lined with thin pink capillaries.
When Humble Dorm Head Lauren ushers us outside and to the mess hall, I try not to touch anyone. It's occurred to me, in watching them, that we are barely the same species. There's me, and there's them. I wonder, for the briefest of moments, if Gram really understood what she was throwing me into. It's a mosh pit of crazies, people so completely mad that they don't seem to register that they've been locked in a prettied up asylum.
But then I remember that it's Gram and Gram doesn't make mistakes.
Breakfast is blurry. I eat some porridge, but it makes me ill, so I run to the loo and throw it up. I end up drinking just a little hot chocolate, which isn't so bad when I mix it with some of the coffee that Nat snuck from the professors' table. I meet a boy called Milgram March, who is my age and seems quite normal, which makes me nervous in a roundabout sort of way. Why would a normal person be here unless they were secretly a freak just pretending to be normal? But Milgram tells me that he likes how my hair is symmetrical and I figure he's probably alright.
And then it is group discussion, which takes place outside on a big picnic blanket when the weather is nice, like today. I don't like sitting on the ground, so I do a bit of a crouch instead. Nat flops down beside me. Athena Whiteraven crosses her ankles to my right. Fiddle, Milgram and sixteen others all form a loose circle around a man who can only be the teacher.
"Hello," he says. He has a dreamy voice, like someone who has only half their mind on the task at hand, and but a few wisps of white hair. His skin is dark with roping tattoos. "I'm Tollin Cambridge."
Tollin Rhymes with Collin. He has a tattoo that says that across the back of his right hand, and the name Maria on the knuckles of his left. The rest of the tattoos are demon summoning diagrams. It's an old custom, tattoos instead of ink and paper, that's still used by indigenous tribes in the South East and South America, but westerners have dropped it. Mostly because you have to carve open your own flesh to make them work.
"Apparently he used to be an anthropologist," whispers Nat in a conspiratorial tone, "so he went to go see how an Indonesian tribe lived and picked up the idea there. The ink must have affected his brain because he's been a bit touched in the head since."
I nod, and Cambridge pushes his sleeves up a bit farther. I can count at least seven or eight diagrams have faded to scar tissue, signifying a terminated contract. Contracts, like the ones my Gram has, are based on a set of three conditions per party – three for the summoner, and three for the demon (Golden Triads, page 129, The Theoretical Summoner). It's beneficial for both human and monster and can only be aborted through mutual agreement, or through a process called Tearing. I saw a documentary on contracts with Gram once, and they interviewed people who'd had to tear away from a contracted demon. They described it as the most incredible pain, like all their nerve endings had been set on fire, like their heart was being torn out, the flesh rent from their bones.
It's no wonder he seems touched, then, if he's had to go through it eight times or more.
For people like me, who don't use their bodies as their Grims, the Tearing is just as painful, but there's no physical scarring. You can never summon the same demon again though, once a contract's been torn. It's a tricky business. Only the best make contracts. Gram has about a dozen.
"Now," says Cambridge. "Since it's the first day, let's all go around and introduce ourselves…"
You're kidding me, I think. Because that's shit. Nice to meet you games are for kids. This is shit. I want to go home. I hate it here.
Shit.
xxx
At Bonnie's, there are stupid things like group discussion, and there are things like Summoning 101, but in the end it's still a school, sanctioned by the government with an ISC approval plaque in the office. So I skip English and chemistry to write some letters – one to Gram, and one to Étienne.
I saw him once over the summer, Étienne, and he taught me how to horseback ride. Animals like him better than me, but I don't mind. It's one of my favourite things about him. He always says that they'd love me, too, if I gave them the chance, but I find horses unsettling. They're very big and I was always afraid that I'd fall off.
I write a very normal letter. Everyone else uses e-mail nowadays, but there's no internet at Bonnie's, so I have to do it old school. I ask him how he's enjoying university and whether he's learned anything interesting yet. He and his roommate recently acquired a cat called The Great Catsby, so I ask about it. I ask him to send me photos of the campus and his new apartment. I tell him that I don't like it at Bonnie's and that I miss and love him. I don't tell him why I don't like it, though, because I don't know how to put the sort of slimy feeling I've got into words without sounding stupid.
I draw a caricature of Headmistress Evelyn and label it, so that he doesn't worry that I actually hate it and will commit suicide, which is something that I worry about.
My second letter is addressed to Gram. I decide to send it to our London address, because that's where she spends most of her time now, though I write a note on the back of the envelope to our housekeeper to forward it to the Paris address if Gram's not in. I include all the usual pleasantries and I ask her about Mackenzie Evelyn. Then I ask her to please get me out of here and I threaten to starve myself to death, though I know she probably won't buy it.
There's a bowl of stamps in the kitchen at the dorm and I stick two on each letter. Instead of going to lunch with everyone else I drop them off at the office where a smiley, rosy-cheeked receptionists promises she'll drop them in the mailbox. I almost snatch them back from her, filled with the sudden impression that she's not going to put them in the mailbox at all. We're allowed to go into to town the last Saturday of every month. I could mail them then. I chew my lip for a moment, then thank her and leave.
I'm not hungry so I spend lunch hunting through the shrubbery for something. I don't know what, but something, anything, that might make me hate Bonnie's a little less. There's the pumpkin patch all tangled up with vines, monkshood grows by the chapel, the willow trees that shade the dorms and bits of barren soil with little signs that say things like 'carrots,' 'sweet potatoes' and 'peas.'
In the farthest corner, where the stone walls that encompass the grounds are very old and crumbly, there is a chicken coop with no chickens in it. More monkshood grows here and blackbirds like the one that blew up peck at the ground. They don't pay me any mind when I crouch to peer in through the coop's little door. My chest feels tight, like when you've just finished watching a scary film and you're afraid that if you turn on the lights or open a door you'll see something horrible. The shadows are deep and I can't see well.
But before I can move closer, the chapel bell rings, which means that class will start in ten minutes.
I decide that I'm not curious enough to look into what is clearly an empty chicken coop, especially an empty chicken coop that makes me want to throw up it gives me such a bad feeling.
On my way back to the main building, I run into Milgram March. He walks with a very straight back and his eyes are slanted and blue. He stops when he sees me, so I stop too.
"They called your name in chemistry," he says stiffly. "Your name was on roll, but you weren't there."
"I wasn't feeling well," I say. Not a lie, not really. Milgram squints at me. He has a fine face, but I think he'd look better if his hair weren't so short. I don't like the way he looks at me, like he's got x-ray eyes and he's seeing my bones, where they carved out the extra rib. The place where broke my collar bone when I was twelve. "Did you know that there's a chicken coop back there?"
"Yes," he replies. He talks strangely, not like someone who knows they're smart, but like someone who just knows. Grampy used to talk like that – completely unpretentious, decisive. Gram used to say people like Grampy had justice in them. I have no idea what that means, but Milgram March gives me that impression. "There were nineteen chickens up until the May of this year. I can tell you what kinds they were, if you like. I have it written down."
"That's okay," I tell him. "Where'd they go? Did they get eaten?"
"They were not eaten by students or staff," he says, as though this annoys him. "I don't know what happened to them. Nineteen chickens do not just disappear."
"Were they stolen?"
He looks at me like I'm stupid. "No. Nothing can be stolen at Bonnie's."
"Oh."
"Besides, why would anyone steal nineteen chickens?"
"I don't know. I hadn't thought of that."
He nods understandingly. "It's a mystery." He glances skyward, looking for something that I cannot fathom. "I hate mysteries. I hate suspense. You seem like the sort of person who understands what I'm talking about."
He's right, but I don't say so. "Where were you going?"
"I misplaced my pencil. I need a new one before class. A mechanical one, with 0.5mm lead."
"I have a pen. Do you want it?"
"You need it for class."
"I'm not going to class."
"You have to go to class. I don't want your pen. I don't accept writing utensils from slackers."
I find this strangely insulting. I've known Milgram March for about three hours, and he's already managed to offend me. Accept the pen, I want to say, accept my stupid pen! But he just gives me a disproving once-over, shakes his head and stalks off to the boys' dorm. I make a face at his back but he either doesn't notice or he doesn't care and just keeps walking with his straight back and stiff, military gait.
This afternoon there is mathematics, physics and summoning theory. I've always been good at maths, so I'll just go to my last class and call it a day. Even going to just that will surely exhaust me.
I feel dumb just standing around doing nothing, but I won't go to learn because I've already told Milgram I wouldn't. I don't want to be in the dorm, either, with its okay floors and blank walls. At home, at the flat where Gram and Grampy and I lived together, my room is all white, but it's not blank. Blank and white are different. Gram taught me that. Just because something is only one thing, doesn't mean it's boring. Even an idiot like me can understand that.
I decide to go back to the chicken coop. At least Milgram gave me more things to think about. It's like a riddle. Bonnie's has nineteen chickens. One day, all the chickens go missing. Nothing can be stolen from Bonnie's and they were not eaten. What happened?
I don't know, but I'd like to. It'll keep me busy, working this through. If my brain is working, then it doesn't have as much time to be depressed. They say that when genii are left too long without intellectual stimuli, their brains rot and they become depressed. I'm not a genius, but I do get despondent if I'm left alone too long. That's why I like math. It's a sensible subject that requires thinking, but in the end always comes down to a definitive answer.
The coop still makes my skin crawl, but this time I go right up to it and look inside. It smells stale. There are three tiers with little piles of straw where the chickens nested, but there are no chickens. For some reason, I'm very relieved. I don't know what I'd expected, but this what I wanted to see. Nothing. I laugh, but it doesn't sound like me. It's like listening to a recording and it's horrible, nervous.
I back away from the coop, not wanting to turn my back to it. I have that tight feeling in my chest again, like my ribcage has shrunk, or maybe like my heart has grown, taking up more space than any heart has a right to. It's almost painful. And, in the same way that Gram has always known and been able to sense monsters, that otherworldliness, I have a perfect grasp of the fact that something terrible has happened here.
I run.
xxx
I lock myself in my bedroom for the rest of the day. I haven't showered for more than forty-eight hours, and I'm hungry, but I pretend to be ill when Nat knocks at my door. I huddle under the covers. Even Humble Dorm Head Lauren comes to see if I'm alive. I make some retching noises so that she won't come inside and I tell her that I haven't died yet before fake vomiting a bit more.
I want to talk to someone. Maybe Nat, because she's been kind to me, or even Milgram, because I think he and I are a bit alike and he seemed interested in the chickens, too. But what would I say? It sounds stupid, even in my head.
I think you should know that the chicken coop on the grounds gives me the heebie-jeebies. Like that? They'd think I'm crazy – just as crazy as they all are. But I'm not. I'm normal, sane, probably the only normal and sane person here. I hate this place. If all the teachers are like Tollin Cambridge, all torn up, wrecked from how many times it's happened to them, then I don't think I can survive here.
I'll really kill myself at this rate: chickens coop with no chickens and professors all ruined from the inside out, no escape.
It takes a very long time before I am able to sleep, but when I do, I have nightmares. I see blackbirds, hundreds of them, all the blackbirds of the world I think, and they all take off at once. They paint the sky oily black, and then red when they hit the wards. I take shelter in the chicken coop, but Mackenzie Evelyn is already there, ripping the feathers off all the chickens and swallowing them whole. And every time she eats a chicken she gets fatter and fatter and she crushes me against the wall of the chicken coop.
"Stop eating!" I tell her. "You'll break the coop! You'll kill me!"
But she doesn't listen and she keeps eating and eating until all of the chickens are gone but she's still hungry. That's when she properly notices me and she opens her mouth real wide. Wide enough to fit one hundred chickens at once. She grabs me and laughs, and her laugh sounds like the worst thing in the world, in the universe. It's only when I can see the feathers caught in her teeth and smell her foul, bloody breath that I wake up.
But I still hear her laughter, and it fills the spaces of my brain and the memory of her horrible mouth makes me vomit for real.
Ha.
Ha.
3. 'Lo, lovelies. I hope you've all been well. I've been slow with writing, but I never forgot you guys! I don't have too much to say, to be honest. I actually am pretty okay with this chapter? I have but one request, and that is for you guys to keep this installment in the back of your mind as me progress through the story.
In any case, big thanks and lots of love to all of my reviewers! I am always very happy to hear your opinions. Furthermore, for any new readers, I am still accepting some characters. Please refer to the Ch1AN. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, via PM here or my tumblr.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day! xoxo
