Mostly Dead Girls

at the door and waiting

"Let's go back and forth," Faye said. She rubbed her fingertip over the rim of her coffee mug, eyes fixed on Dorita's hands. "I say something about me, you say something about you."

She hadn't talked to anyone about her past before. She'd given a bunch of people the sanitized, Cliff Notes, good-girl-from-a-bad-family version, but right now she needed to be truthful. Her chest felt tight. "Should I start?"

Dorita spread her hands. They had regained a little bit of color—she still looked sickly, and there were strange wet lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, but it was a definite improvement from when she'd first stumbled in. "Go ahead."

"Okay." Start with the name thing, that would get a lot of facts over with. "Okay, so, the first thing you gotta know is that Marcelina—the town—was stuck somewhere between a one-horse town and a ghost town."

"Half a horse?"

Faye grinned, surprised by the comment. The electricity had had an even better effect on Dorita than she'd hoped—her voice sounded far less gravelly. "Yeah, half a horse. And one broken-down car. I don't know what got it built there in the first place, but it was down a half-gone road in the middle of a forest, and we didn't get many visitors. Marcelina—my mom—told me that it was starting to go south even when she first left, and it was only her and Nicolas moving back in that kept it from vanishing entirely. They'd both done what they wanted out in the world at large, I guess; Marcelina got married and divorced in about two months and Nicolas killed a bunch of people."

"Why?"

Faye shrugged. "He never told me. As far as anyone can figure, he was one of the people who just did it because they were... there. He'd kill anyone who came near the town, too, but that had a reason."

"Huh."

"Anyway—after he killed some people, and Marcelina had divorced, they both decided they were done with the world, and moved back home." She frowned, trying to recall details. "Well... they lived there when they were younger. I don't think anyone knows where they first came from, where they grew up. I think maybe Poland, or something? Marcelina would never tell me."

"Doesn't sound like they told you much."

Faye put her coffee cup down a little harder than she'd meant to. "No."

Dorita touched the back of her hand. Her fingertips were chilly, but strangely comforting. "You were telling me about the name?"

"Right, right." It was so easy to lose track, to go down one or another of the winding paths in her mind. "What I was getting to was—there were about thirty people left in town while I was growing up, and that's being generous. Some of them were scared of Nicolas, and some of them just didn't care, and the sheriff—who'd already taken over for the mayor—skipped town right after Nicolas came back, so he just took over." She kicked her chair back on two legs, looking at the ceiling.

"He changed the town's name to my mom's for her birthday. I was like ten at the time, and I think that was the first time I realized Nicolas was in charge. Usually there were these two old women—weird Puritan names, I can't remember them all—that people took their problems to, and I thought they ran the town. He was always off in the woods for some reason. But they didn't like him changing the town's name—they thought it was frivolous and prideful—and he did it anyway."

"Were they afraid he would kill them?"

Faye chewed on her lip, thinking. "Maybe. But it wasn't as if he ever threatened, you know? He was just—there." How could she possibly explain Nicolas? "He was one of those huge guys. Like, I'd believe he was seven feet tall. But he was so quiet and graceful you could never even hear him coming. I think a lot of people in Marcelina-the-town thought he was the devil. Or related to the devil. He was larger than life."