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  For Todd,

  who proves that there truly is magic in Brooklyn

  Night, you bring home all things

  That the shining dawn scatters:

  You bring home a lamb,

  Bring home a kid,

  Bring home a child to its mother.

  —Sappho, as translated by

  my grandmother, Anne Porter

  Then the eyes of the little doll began to shine like two candles. It ate a little of the bread and drank a little of the soup and said: “Don’t be afraid, Wassilissa the Beautiful. Be comforted. Say thy prayers, and go to sleep. The morning is wiser than the evening.”

  —Post Wheeler, “Wassilissa the Beautiful”

  PRELUDE IN NIGHT

  EARLY LAST AUTUMN

  When Night looked down, it saw its own eyes staring back at it. Two big black eyes, both full of stars. At first Night ignored them. Probably that strange gaze was its own reflection in a puddle, or maybe in a mirror left shattered in the street. Then it noticed something that made it curious: those eyes were full of stars, but the constellations inside them were unfamiliar. It was like gazing into the sky above another world.

  Night decided to investigate. It reached out tendrils of darkness to examine this odd phenomenon. The eyes nestled, as eyes often will, inside a human face, at the top of a strong man’s body. But how could night—another, different, unimaginable Night—live inside a human being?

  The man waited, unmoving, on a dark field ringed by houses. Between his widened lids stars flurried through expanding black. Planets circulated like blood. Night had never seen anything so much like itself before, and a terrible longing surged through it. Maybe, finally, it had found a companion; maybe it was saved from being forever alone!

  Night drew closer to him, and then closer still. The man waited, as rigid as death. He did not react in the slightest when Night came and perched on his cheekbones to get a better look. It breathed across his lashes and set them trembling. The man did not answer, not even with a blink. When Night shyly kissed him he felt very cold.

  All of that should have been enough to make Night wary. It should have drawn back in alarm, floated safely above the streetlamps. But Night had been lonely for too long, and it forgot all about caution. It did not even notice that the man’s face had peculiar coloring: pearly grayish white from the bottom of the nose down and coal black above. All that interested Night was what it saw inside his eyes. A meteor shot through their depths trailing brilliance after it. Night yearned, more than anything, to follow that streaking light.

  If only it had been honest with itself, it would have admitted that the situation was suspicious. But Night, which hides everything in folds of shadow, is not in the habit of honesty. Since the man did not react to its caresses, it decided to touch him more deeply. A bit nervously, it stroked between his eyelids. His skull seemed to be hollow. He wasn’t breathing. Night prodded again, curling a dark tendril through one empty socket. But the man still didn’t move or even smile. Didn’t he notice that Night was there? Didn’t he realize Night loved him? Having gone already so far, too far, Night lost all restraint and licked and coiled its way into those eyes. It tried to speak. To beg for some reply.

  And then the eyelids snapped shut, slicing right though Night’s soft body.

  It took Night a moment to understand. A part of itself was now trapped inside the man and couldn’t get out.

  It could hear that lost piece of itself crying, crashing frantically around the inside of the hollow man as it searched for an exit. He wasn’t a man at all, but a trap, and Night understood what a fool it had been to fall for those glittering stars. They were only an illusion meant to draw it in. They were bait. Night battered at the eyelids, trying to set the stolen part of itself free. They stayed stubbornly closed.

  Night raged like a bear that sees its cub caged and wounded.

  It grew even more furious when the old woman came and pinned the eyelids securely shut with a pair of needle-sharp golden stars. This must be her doing! If dark could kill, the old woman would have crumpled to the ground in an instant.

  But she didn’t. She stood there grinning with satisfaction while Night silently shrieked.

  “That’s right,” she told Night. It realized she was no ordinary woman by the fact that she spoke to it in its own language. What human ever talks to Night? “Part of you will be staying with me, you see? Snug as a tapeworm in a rat’s gut.”

  The captured piece of Night’s darkness rattled and cried to return to its parent. It seemed like a distinct being now that they were separated. A shadow-baby. It wept and howled and Night couldn’t even comfort it.

  “Oh, don’t fuss,” the old woman crooned into the empty man’s ear, addressing her captive night-child. “I made a mockery of man. You see? I made him just for you. He’s your new home. Isn’t he handsome?”

  Night hunched over the old woman, wondering desperately how it could hurt her. It managed to yank her hair with a breeze, but that was hardly enough. She only leered at it in response.

  “You, too. There’s no point in complaining. You won’t be getting your little bitty back, you see? Not ever. But don’t you worry, I’ll treat him humanely. And yes, he’s him. He’s a man now, in a manner of speaking. I’ll keep him asleep and he won’t need to feel the pain of separation. Not quite so much, at least.”

  With that she lowered a helmet onto the black-and-white head. The helmet was huge, domed like a planetarium, and though it looked much bigger than the head it still seemed to fit perfectly. She slipped a visor of opaque black glass over the star-stabbed eyes.

  The lost fragment of Night quieted, falling into a deep sleep inside what looked like a large, muscular man.

  The man was sitting astride what appeared to be a black motorcycle, and the old woman reached to start something that was not actually an engine, though it sounded like one. Night watched the blind, man-shaped prison begin to drive in a circle. Around and around.

  Night’s consciousness is one infinite starry moment, timeless and drifting. It was no surprise, then, that it was so easily confused. Without understanding what was happening, Night was falling for the same trick in a dozen different locations, all at the same moment. A dozen old women sank golden stars into the eyelids of a dozen hollow men. Night’s pieces became like lost children, riding forever on identical motorcycles in identical parking lots in scattered cities. Night lingered wherever it saw them. Hoping someday to bring them home.

  Hoping they could all be one again. Join back together, and share the same stars.

  CHAPTER 1

  People live here on purpose; that’s what I’ve heard. They even
cross the country deliberately and move in to the neighborhoods near the river, and suddenly their shoes are cuter than they are, and very possibly smarter and more articulate as well, and their lives are covered in sequins and they tell themselves they’ve arrived. They put on tiny feathered hats and go to parties in warehouses; they drink on rooftops at sunset. It’s a destination and everyone piles up and congratulates themselves on having made it all the way here from some wherever or other. To them this is practically an enchanted kingdom. A whole lot of Brooklyn is like that now, but not the part where I live.

  Not that there isn’t any magic around here. If you’re dumb enough to look in the wrong places, you’ll stumble right into it. It’s the stumbling out again that might become an issue. The best thing you can do is ignore it. Cross the street. Don’t make eye contact—if by some remote chance you encounter something with eyes.

  This isn’t even a slum. It’s a scrappy neither-nor where no one arrives. You just find yourself here for no real reason, the same way the streets and buildings did, squashed against a cemetery that sprawls out for miles. It has to be that big, because the dead of New York keep falling like snow but never melt. There’s an elevated train station where a few subway lines rattle overhead in their anxiety to get somewhere else. We have boarded-up appliance stores and nail salons, the Atlantis Wash and Lube, and a mortuary on almost every block. There are houses, the kind that bundle four families close together and roll them around in one another’s noise as if the ruckus was bread crumbs and somebody was going to come along soon and deep-fry us. Really, it’s such a nothing of a place that I have to dye my hair purple just to have something to look at. If it weren’t for those little zigs of color jumping in the corners of my eyes, I might start to think that I was going blind.

  It seemed that way even before the nights started lasting such a very, very long time.

  * * *

  We can’t prove it. By the clock everything’s fine. The sun goes down around seven p.m. these days, right on schedule for your standard New York April, and comes up at six the next morning. The effect was so sneaky at first that it was months before anybody worked up the nerve to say anything. Then, maybe around November, I started hearing discreet wisecracks, muttered like they were something embarrassing, like, “Hey, Vassa! Long time no see!” when I walked into school in the morning. But winter was coming on then, anyway, so you could tell yourself that, hey, the nights are supposed to feel long now.

  By January, though, it was getting harder to ignore. It gets to the point, when your whole family is waking up around two a.m., and eating cereal, and shuffling around, and watching a lot of old movies, and then it’s still only three thirty so you all go back to bed, where you might kind of mention that it seems a little unusual. And when it gets to be February, then March, and the nights are officially getting shorter but everyone can feel how they drag on and on, the hours like legless horses struggling to make it to the end of the darkness, then you might even start to complain. You might say that the nights feel like they’re swallowing your drab nowhere neighborhood and refusing to cough it back up again the way they ought to. And the more the nights gobble up, the bigger and fatter and stronger they get, and the more they need to eat, until nobody can fight their way through to the next dawn.

  I’m exaggerating. Morning does always come around eventually. At least, it does for now.

  See, to whatever degree we have magic around here, it’s strictly the kind that’s a pain in the ass.

  * * *

  So it’s the middle of the night—unprecedented, I know—and the kid upstairs is practicing skateboarding on some kind of janky homemade half pipe and wiping out at ten-second intervals and I’m watching a random black-and-white movie with the girls people call my sisters, though they’re sisters step and fractional. I forget, but I think Chelsea is step-half and Stephanie is third-step once removed, or something like that, or possibly it’s the other way around. Whatever they are exactly, they’ve been assigned to me by the twitching of fate, and they’re usually at least plausibly sisteresque. We even share a bedroom. The woman who it’s fair to assume must have given birth to at least one of us, but by no means to me, is off at the night shift at the pharmacy where she works in Manhattan. Seems awful to be stuck with the night shift now, but she says it’s not as bad there. She says people barely notice the difference yet in Manhattan. She says they can afford all the day they want. Maybe they’ve found some slot where you can stick a credit card and order up a new morning.

  Steph whirls in with a bowl of microwave popcorn and sets it on the bed between her and Chels. She scowls a bit when I come crawling across their pink-fleeced legs to snag some, piling it on the back of my chemistry textbook and then carrying it to my own bed. However carefully I balance, there’s a fair amount of drift over the book’s sides. Popcorn is hardly ideal, too noisy, but it’ll have to do.

  It’s a rotten movie for my purposes. Ingrid Bergman is kissing somebody. Personally I prefer guys who are less gray, though I guess she’s in no position to be picky. “Let’s watch something else.”

  “Shut up, Vass. It’s almost the end!”

  “Then you won’t be missing much, right?” But there’s no hurry. They’ll put on something nice and loud eventually. There’s a lot of squirming in the pocket of my sweatshirt and I cover it with my hand. Tiny teeth nip at my thumb, though the thick fabric keeps it from hurting much. So impatient.

  Static abruptly drowns out Ingrid, forcing the issue. That happens a lot these days and then there’s nothing to do but change the channel, which Stephanie does after casting a scowl my way. Just because it’s convenient for me doesn’t make it my fault.

  The next movie is tenderly devoted to chasing and shooting and blasting. When the first car goes up in a fireball I slip a puff of corn into my pocket and then start crunching loudly myself for good measure. Chels and Steph don’t seem to notice. They’re mesmerized by the flashing lights. I can hear it, though, the shrill styrofoamy nibble-squeak from my pocket. I can feel the slight vibrations against my waist as she chews. A tiny fist prodding my guts. Erg wants more. Such a little thing, but she never stops eating, and why should she? When you’re carved out of wood you never gain weight. I’ve seen her gnaw through a candy bar bigger than she is in two hours flat. I’ve seen her actually burrow under the crispy batter on a chicken leg and then pop out near the bone, leaving the skin sagging into the tunnel left by her mauling.

  Erg and I have gone on this long without Chels or Steph or anyone getting wise to her. My sisters think I’m the greedy one, always stashing cookies in my pockets for later. They think I suffer from strange compulsions. All my clothes have grease stains on the right hip. Sometimes I get sick of how demanding she is. Sometimes I’ve even toyed with the idea of letting her go hungry for a few days, or even not feeding her again. She’d complain at first but eventually, I’m pretty sure, she’d just go back to being inanimate.

  Instead I stuff a whole handful of popcorn in. No matter what I pretend, I’ll never actually starve her, and she knows it. She’s the only thing I have from my mother so there’s nostalgia working in her favor, and then I made a promise.

  Little crunching noises squeak from my pocket. I’m way ahead on my reading for school, we all are—Chels has already moved on to college math and science textbooks, just to have something to do—but I get out Great Expectations anyway and try to concentrate.

  In the window it’s night, with cottony puffs of light clinging to the streetlamps. In the window there’s no hint of dawn. It’s been 4:02 a.m. for an astoundingly long time. Then 4:03. Progress!

  I look up at the TV for a moment to see a girl with big curls and a plaid cap walking past shuttered stores. The street is dark and she jumps as a rat skitters over her boot. She looks lost and lonely, hunching her shoulders to hold off the night. Then a tide of light washes her face and she looks up in rapture to see a BY’s. Wow, you can see her thinking, it’s still open! The store dances a
nd spins and as the girl pirouettes ecstatically more BY’s stores appear around her, and more, all dancing on spindly legs of their own, until the whole dark night gets crowded out by the flash of their windows. “Turn around,” the girl sings. “Turn around and stand like Momma placed you! Face me, face me!”

  We’ve all seen this ad a million times, of course. None of us can be bothered to make snide remarks anymore, or to mention that they left out the all-important ring of stakes skewering rotting human heads. All the mockery we could possibly mock is too done and too obvious and wasn’t really all that funny in the first place. We used to sing, “Turn around. Turn around and run the other way! Chop me, chop me!”

  We don’t bother. Maybe it means we’re getting old. Maybe the nights are so long now that we’re only superficially kids, and we’ve lost years to the darkness.

  Steph suddenly puts a hand to her throat and lets out a gasp.

  “What?” Chelsea asks her. “You lost your locket?” She shoots me a significant look. The slight squirming in my pocket stops dead.

  “I was wearing it! I hope—maybe I just knocked the clasp open?” Steph starts ransacking her pillows.

  “It will show up soon, I’m quite sure,” Chelsea says, taking time to enunciate each word, and arches her eyebrows my way.

  I excuse myself to the bathroom and perch on the toilet lid. The bathroom is bright pink, with this cheesy mermaid wallpaper Steph picked out when she was five; the shower curtain is stained with garish purple streaks from my hair dye. I can feel the lump in the pocket of my hoodie but it’s as still as a wad of used tissues. Erg is pretending to be asleep. I get her by one tiny wooden foot and drag her out anyway. She dangles upside down, her eyes closed, her painted black hair gleaming in its flat spit curls. She doesn’t react when I drop her in the sink, which is enough to prove that she’s faking.