The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

I’m a freelance editor. I turn decent books into decently readable books and hopeless books into hopeless books with better grammar.

Bongo is an excellent watchdog, by which I mean that he will watch very alertly as the serial killer breaks into the house and skins me.

But if the UPS guy ever tries to put one over on us, Bongo’s on the case. If dogs had religion, Satan would be the UPS guy.

(Yes, I own a hound dog and a pickup truck. No, I don’t have a gun rack on it. I fired a BB gun once in Girl Scouts. It went bang and made my h...

But I had Bongo, and he saved our lives because he is simple and made of nose.)

The doll room. I’d forgotten all about that. She’d had those awful china dolls with the painted eyes, which were bad enough, but she’d really liked the newborn dolls. The ones all made up to look like realistic babies, except that when something’s that realistic, it just looks dead.

There is probably a sum of money that could have incited me to sleep in that room. I am not wealthy and I can be bought. But it would be up in the thousands. I’m easy, but not cheap.

It’s in my head again, like a song that keeps replaying. When that happens, I read it in the book, and that makes it stop, but now I can’t. This must be what going mad feels like.

Books on World War II appear spontaneously in any house that contains a man over a certain age. I believe that’s science.

It is an immutable law of the universe that whenever you listen to NPR in a strange place, it will be Pledge Week.

“Hey, be careful, yeah?” “Careful?” I said, a bit more sharply than I intended. “Ah, you know. Things in the woods around here.”

I hummed and I scrubbed and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that by “things in the woods” Tomas hadn’t meant skunks at all.

I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.

“I bet it’s aliens,” I told Bongo. “It’s always aliens.” Bongo had no opinion.

Folklore different here, but same too. Poppets and dolls. Plat-eyes. Maybe the same. White creatures, not real beasts.

Bongo’s nose is far more intelligent than the rest of him, and I believe it uses his brain primarily as a counterweight).

Cotgrave had seen changelings in Wales? Well, I’d never been, but it seemed like the sort of place you’d get them. Perhaps Welsh fairies stole children and confiscated their vowels.

Who would have made this? Images stuttered through my head, none of them terribly coherent—sociopaths, serial killers, Satanic death cult, some stupid college kids, performance artists, monsters monsters monsters—

Moonshiners and white supremacists. Lovely. If that was what Cotgrave was seeing up in the hills, I could see how he’d gone sarcastic about Americans.

“I sure as hell ain’t opening that door! I’ve seen horror movies!”

“Don’t mind me, hon, I get sarcastic when I’m scared to the tits.”

Everybody yells at Orpheus and Lot’s wife. Put yourself in their shoes for five minutes and you’d yell a lot less, I promise you.

People like Ambrose talk about forbidden knowledge. Nobody talks about knowledge that is just a dreadfully bad idea all around.

Look, I ordered myself, as we entered that quiet square. Look. The horror movie gets less scary once the monster comes out of the shadows. Just look at them. See what you’re up against.

I’d go to… to a mall or a Walmart or something. Surely unholy abominations wouldn’t follow me to Walmart.

The truck hood dented under its weight. I didn’t care about that—a truck without dents in it is probably a stupid truck anyway—but it was touching my truck. I didn’t even let boyfriends drive my truck.