Chapter Text
Temperance Sawyer woke up on the morning of August 18, 1973 without any clear plan of what she was going to do that day. This was because it was a day like any other, unexceptional and with nothing in particular assigned to it to make it significant. Her family had been going about their business as usual for the past several months without anything to distinguish most of the days from each other, and she suspected today would be more of the same.
Strange, how the passage of time could blur the many individual days making up the better part of a year into each other like that. Looking back it was all a vague haze, for the most part. The only days that shook things up a little were what they called feast days, and they hadn’t had one of those for a while. They happened about once a month, but there wasn’t any sort of regular schedule. They did have to be planned in advance.
She supposed things had been going on like this for as long as she could remember, but at least until a few years ago Chastity had been there, and the whole family was together. Temperance avoided looking at the empty bed on the other side of the room for longer than she needed to. It had been almost a year since she last heard anything from her twin sister, and if she thought about her for too long it would just depress her, which she didn’t have time for.
Temperance had been up late the previous night, having needed to find the right hour to get to the cemetery and complete her latest art project without anyone seeing her. If she could she would have stayed there all night so she could be there when the sun came up, and get what she was sure would be some truly spectacular shots of it in the early morning light as it edged into full daylight. It almost certainly wasn’t going to be there much longer than that, since her creations were usually taken down and reinterred as soon as somebody found them the next morning. This ephemerality, some might say, was key to the unique quality of her art, but she did wish she could see it for herself during the day more often. As it was she had to be content with the nighttime photos she could get with the flash on, which did have their own striking compositional elements. She’d pinned her shots of last night to the wall on her side of the room once they’d developed, after she had gotten back in through the window, which Patience still didn’t know could be accessed by scaling the side of the house if you knew where to put your feet. It was why she and Chass never locked their window, for each other’s sake.
Patience was used to her sleeping in late these days, since it wasn’t as if she had anywhere to be or anything to do early in the day. As she liked to remind her sisters, Patience was the only one in the family who still had a real job, and she was usually there already by the time Temperance got up. At this point she could trust that Temperance already knew what she was going to say before she left – mostly reminders not to go off on her own while Lacey was the only other one there, and if she must leave the house not to do anything that would draw too much attention to herself, like messing around with cadavers in the graveyard.
Temperance was aware of the reasoning for Patience’s rules just as much as she was aware that if she always did as her oldest sister said, she would essentially never leave the house at all, and she couldn’t live like that. Lacey already lived like that and Temperance could safely say that as much as she loved her younger sister, she did not envy her life.
Temperance flung aside the bedsheets she hadn’t bothered making for the last few weeks (it had been way too hot to sleep under covers anyway) and stepped out of bed without looking, planting her foot directly on to something that she could feel splinter under her heel as she swung her leg onto the floor.
She hissed, less from the pain and more from the instant knowledge that something had been broken, and sat back down, bringing her left foot up onto the bed with her to assess the damage. The shards of a small bird’s skull lay on the floor with a few more embedded in her bare heel, with a trailing string that had once been threaded through the skull’s eye sockets letting her know where it had come from.
Damn. She’d loved that necklace ever since she first found the skull. She had worn it almost every day since, and now she was going to have to wait until she found another equally well-preserved bird skeleton, which were rarer than you’d think.
Maybe that was what she would do today, she thought as she picked bone fragments out of her heel, dropping them back on her bedroom floor with a vague resolve to pick them up later. Look for another dead bird of the right size, or at the very least a skeleton with an intact skull.
Lacey was downstairs, as usual trying to prove herself as the responsible sibling by getting some kind of chore done. Right now she was sweeping the kitchen floor with a far-off look to her like a sad grotesquely-masked Cinderella.
Temperance didn’t have any time to feel sorry for her, though, now that she had a goal for herself for the day. She really didn’t think there was anything to worry about, leaving Lacey home alone. It seemed to Temperance that her younger sister had a better handle on things around here than anyone else, and there hadn’t been any incidents yet. They both knew not to let any strangers in the house, and it wasn’t as if Lacey would ever answer the door herself when she was the only one home anyway. Temperance didn’t think about her sister that often while she was out on her own. It wasn’t as if she was missing out on Temperance’s great company, she thought.
“I’m going out,” she said, which Lacey didn’t necessarily need to know, since that was what Temperance did almost every day. But she felt like she should say something while they were in the room together.
Lacey nodded, then indicated with a gesture to the table that Temperance should eat something before she left. Temperance would have argued this point except for the fact that she knew she often forgot to eat anything during the day, and had been in the position of suddenly finding herself absolutely starving by noon with nothing around to sate herself but insects and roadkill. So she went to the plate Lacey had left out, and polished off what might have been the last of the remaining meat from the previous feast day.
She could tell it wasn’t from an animal. She closed her eyes briefly while savoring it – soon enough it would be time again to stock up on more.
Before going out, Temperance gathered up everything she might need: her camera, which she slung around her neck first thing; her homemade bag that she used for keeping her photographs and other small items of import, which she also wore around her neck to keep her hands as free as possible; another bag she could carry to throw in any larger things she found and wanted to keep; and at least one knife for protection and bloodletting, which she strapped to her ankle before lacing up her shoes. (She’d gotten dressed in the same clothes she’d worn the previous day; no sense in wasting too much time deciding on something new. She didn’t have Lacey or Chastity’s sense for that kind of thing, and besides she didn’t handle the laundry, nor did she think it needed to be done that often.) Missing her bird-skull necklace already, she slipped on another one of her favorite accessories, the bracelet she’d made by stringing a chunk of something’s vertebrae on a little chain. She rubbed the bone between her fingers for luck, and set out.
She didn’t expect to be gone for more than a few hours. Then again, she could never guarantee where the road would take her.
She didn’t end up finding any bird skulls, intact or otherwise, but she did manage to pick up a few interesting things on her way. She salvaged some bones from a dead rabbit that had been mostly picked clean by bugs and scavengers, and collected some scattered feathers adrift in the scant breeze they got. She considered picking up a dead armadillo by the side of the road but decided against it due to it being a little too unwieldy for her bag, and paused for some time by the corpse of a dog that had met with a similar fate, probably using up about half her film by trying to get as many camera angles as she could of its remains. Its jaw had been mostly torn off. You could tell the whole story of the impact through her photos.
After that she ended up passing the building where they slaughtered cattle, with the cows lined up in the holding pens outside, unaware they would soon be going to their deaths. Or maybe they did know – they weren’t far off from the site of the killing, could possibly even hear their fellows’ final screams as they were knocked in the head and their throats slit.
No, they didn’t do it that way anymore. So she’d heard. After Lacey had been let go, this place switched to something else, this new automated system that supposedly stunned the cows quicker and easier without anybody having to swing a hammer over and over to hopefully get it right the first time. Without having to pay anybody extra to do that, either. It felt so long ago that Temperance herself had last worked there, doing the actual killing part of the process, letting the cattle bleed out under her hand and her blade after Lacey had done the stunning part. Really, Lacey was pretty good at killing them first, but Temperance’s job, she always thought, was to make absolute certain they were dead. Sometimes it took multiple hits to take someone down, and they didn’t have the time for that.
So maybe it was more efficient, this new way they were doing things, but that didn’t always mean quality, her grandmother would have said. The same thing had happened to her all those years ago, and she had said it would only be a matter of time before their local processing plant caught up. She said automation was just an excuse to lay off as many workers as possible when an industry needed to cut back. She would have been furious if she knew her youngest granddaughter had fallen victim to it.
It wasn’t why they’d let Temperance go the year before that, though. She knew as well as anyone that it was because she wasn’t as good at her job as she could be and got distracted too easily and creeped everybody else out. She wasn’t bitter about it or anything, but it had been something to do, at least, and now Patience was the only one earning any money in the house, which wasn’t much. It had been really unfair what happened to Lacey.
She still liked to hang around here for the pictures, though, even if they’d chase her off if anyone caught her on the premises. She paused in front of a cow she thought briefly was dead already, its eyes glazed and its tongue hanging out of its mouth. No, it wasn’t dead, it was still breathing – panting, more like. It looked sick. She wondered if they’d notice that before slaughtering it, if they’d bother to check before or after it was dead. You couldn’t sell meat from a sick cow, could you? Then people would get sick if they ate it. She imagined the tainted meat making its way to the shelves and some random people buying it at the supermarket and cooking it up, none the wiser. How many people could one cow feed?
She cocked her head, focused her lens, and snapped a pretty good shot of the cow in between two other normal-looking ones, looking especially unwell. If some kind of scandal broke she’d have the proof right here, but no one would know to ask her for it. No one knew anything about what went on behind those walls, and she’d been one of the lucky few privy to it not long ago.
She did miss it, sometimes. It had been kind of enjoyable, to be around so much death as part of a job. One that was important, even. Funny how all those men thought she was weird for getting a little too into it. Hadn’t they all signed up for the same thing?
Temperance really had planned to be home early that day. It was just after noon – she didn’t have a watch, but she’d gotten good at telling the time from the position of the sun in the sky – when she decided she had enough for the day and should start heading back.
It had been hot all day, but now she was really starting to feel it. She mopped her brow with one arm, impressed by how much sweat she was producing, and lifted her hair off her neck before letting it down again. Maybe she should have let Lacey braid it this morning like she sometimes did, which was as close to putting it up as she was comfortable with.
Whatever, she’d be home soon anyway, and could sit in front of a fan all she wanted with the generator running. She could walk back, but as usual, it was more expedient to stand where she was at the side of the road, wait for a car coming in the right direction, and stick her thumb out.
The first vehicle to slow down was a pale green van. She thought it had passed her by at first, but then it stopped and they slid the door open, and she ran up to be let in.
“Where you headed?”
“South,” she said. It was her go-to answer when she needed to go home. She’d long since given up on trying to give more specific directions; it was much easier to just point them the right way and let them know when they were getting close. It wasn’t safe anyway for her to be telling strangers exactly where she lived. That was one of the many reasons Patience could never know she was doing this.
There were five people in the van, besides herself. She eyed them all one at a time, sizing them up as they looked back at her, mostly warily. She could tell when people who had been perfectly willing to give her a ride when they first saw her suddenly started having second thoughts, but once she was in there was nothing they could do about it. Nobody wanted to kick a poor lost maybe-homeless girl out of their car.
She assessed her fellow passengers, settling on each of them in turn. Three girls, two guys. The driver was a guy with thick glasses and an interestingly-patterned shirt she couldn’t see from where she was; there was another guy who she mostly dismissed upon glancing at him, sitting next to a girl with reddish hair, wearing a blue shirt that tied around her neck and bright red shorts that showed off her bare legs; a girl with long blonde hair and a purple tank top who, like Temperance, was wearing long pants even on this hot day; and a stocky girl with curly dark hair who Temperance immediately took special notice of. Not because she was the only one in a wheelchair, which was a mild curiosity at best, but because she looked like she could be part of the family, with her large brown eyes that reminded Temperance of Lacey right away. And because she was the only one looking at her with something more like interest than fear.
She knew she’d been right to like this girl, when they got into a conversation about the slaughterhouse – which was just perfect, she never knew what to talk about when she found herself with a group of new people – and she seemed genuinely interested. And it turned out they had a connection, too, since both of them had grandparents who used to work there. It sounded like this girl’s grandfather had been in more of a management position, though, so maybe she’d have to be careful with how she talked about her family’s history with the way things were run. And she knew how they made headcheese.
And she had a pocket knife. Temperance found herself transfixed when the girl casually took it out and started idly playing with it, the same way Temperance did with her own blades sometimes but didn’t because it seemed to make people nervous. No one here looked nervous, though, or at least not any more than they were already, so she thought it might be alright if she borrowed it. The girl did let her take it, even if she was a little surprised.
Temperance was admiring the knife in her hands when, almost without thinking, she pressed the blade to her palm and dragged it across. She hardly felt it at first, which was the mark of a good sharp instrument, and watched the skin of her hand open up and the blood well up and start flowing before the burn of pain started. She glanced up as the blood started trickling down her wrist to see everyone staring at her, equally horrified, including the girl who had the knife in the first place.
Well, she thought, handing it back, not everyone found the sensation as interesting as she did. She knew she shouldn’t do that in front of strangers, even her sisters didn’t like her doing it at all, but as reactions went this wasn’t that bad. She was feeling a lot of affection for the girl who had so kindly let her have her knife in the first place, who was so clearly trying her best to be polite even when the others weren’t thrilled to see Temperance showing off her own weapon.
All of a sudden she had the urge to commemorate this encounter. It wasn’t often that she met someone she got along this well with when hitching a ride, and she got the feeling there was something special about this one. Perhaps she’d just gotten the idea because she already had her camera on her, or maybe the presence of someone she liked was making her simultaneously more comfortable and a little on edge, feeling like she had to do this now or something would be lost. Whatever the case, she aimed her camera, and while the whole group reacted, some of them trying to smile, some of them giving her the same skeptical looks as they had been the whole time, she tried to focus on one in particular.
When you took a photograph of someone, she knew, it gave you a certain amount of power over them, capturing their image for yourself. If you gave them the photograph, though, you could give them some of that power back, letting them keep it for themselves. But if you really wanted to solidify a bond between the two of you, there had to be some kind of exchange made. She’d done this before.
Except here she’d overstepped her boundaries, and she knew it the moment she saw their reactions when she mentioned payment. That girl was still trying to be polite, oh, she loved her for it, but her time here was quickly running out and she was going to have to do something fast if she wanted this to work.
You could have dinner with us, she’d offered earlier, when she was still a little giddy and not expecting them to seriously consider it, having herself a private laugh at the idea of it. But it had been a while since they’d properly had guests, and she wouldn’t mind if this group showed up at all. It wasn’t likely that she’d get to keep one, but she could try. If she played it right.
If you took a photograph of someone, you could affect their fate with what you chose to do with it. They were all watching her curiously to see what she’d do next. They all showed up in the photo, even if not all of them were equally in focus. She laid out her supplies, which she’d picked up from various sources over the years, and struck the match, hitting the faces on the periphery first.
There was a collective gasp as the smoke went up, and as she fanned the flames she knew they were going to force her out by any means necessary. But she already knew what she was going to do to ensure her favorite’s safety – before they could grab her, she’d snatched her own knife from her ankle and slashed the girl’s arm open. Perfect balance.
She had to quickly bite the inside of her own hand to get the blood flowing again, enough to draw something on the door of the van as she struggled to hold on for long enough after they shoved her out. Hopefully that would ensure they came back to the house at some point, rather than something non-specifically bad happening like them crashing into an oncoming truck.
She let them go once she’d done what she needed, and then spit into the air in their general direction for good measure, watching them drive off. If you spit three times in the right place you could protect yourself, or you could drive in a curse. She might as well cover all her bases, just to ensure something would happen.
Afterwards she felt good about how it had ended up, but she did forget for a time what she’d originally been going to do.
It was dark by the time she made it home.
She’d spent some time in the cemetery again, not taking anything, just hanging around to see what they’d done with the bodies she had arranged the night before, until they started asking what she was doing and she took the cue to scamper. Afterwards she headed out to the old abandoned house not far from their own, where she strung up a few new talismans to protect it further; it was her special place, and it still looked as if no one had touched it in years. Then she went back out to the road to take a few more pictures and collect some more roadkill, and she was considering going back for that rabbit she’d seen earlier when she realized the sun was going down and she would need to get back home as soon as possible or Patience would be there first.
She was not so lucky, even though she could have sworn based on the position of the moon that she still had a few minutes to spare.
Temperance froze in the headlights, and then Patience was upon her, wielding a broomstick and demanding to know what the hell she was doing, telling her things she already knew like I told you never to leave your sister alone and I told you to stay away from that graveyard while Temperance tried weakly to defend herself, since she had been to the graveyard today and they didn’t seem to know anything connecting it to her.
This didn’t last that long, though, because it turned out they did have a guest after all. Patience forgot anything she might have been mad at Temperance about once she needed her to help escort someone into the house with a bag over their head.
Apparently a lot had happened while she had been gone, which Patience was quick to point out – as if Temperance had anything to do with Lacey deciding to carve a hole into the front door, which they were going to have to deal with first thing the next day. Still, she felt a small pang of guilt for not being there to help her with whatever had been going on.
They got their guest to the table, seated her in a chair, and pulled the bag off her head, and as soon as Temperance saw her face she was newly delighted, because it was the blonde girl from the van earlier that day. It worked!
If this girl was here, it meant Lacey probably managed to get all the others on her own, and Temperance skipped into the kitchen to congratulate her. Then she saw a folded wheelchair in the corner and remembered – her friend, the one she’d tried to save.
Oh, she thought. She figured you couldn’t expect that much to go right at once. At least now they could use the chair to help get Grandma around. They still had to carry her downstairs, though.
The first thing they did when guests were over was to feed Grandma with some of their blood, which was the only thing she was able and willing to eat in her advanced age. When they went too long between feasts they had to start feeding her with their own blood, and while Temperance was always willing to do it, it had to be a group effort or she would get drained fast in order to give her enough. That didn’t matter so much with guests even if they only had one.
The girl passed out quicker than expected. Temperance was surprised at first until she realized it probably wasn’t from blood loss. It happened sometimes, when they were that scared.
“Well,” said Patience, “what should we do with her now?”
Things had calmed down now that their guest was unconscious. Lacey had been busy all day, dealing with the other four wandering into the house for whatever reason. She’d discovered the last two hanging around the outskirts of their property after dark and had killed Temperance’s favorite before she noticed her bandaged arm, which Temperance guessed wouldn’t have been a problem if she had come back home earlier, and bothered to explain that. As it stood, she’d already started butchering them, and had enough for a real feast with just the first three.
(“Not her yet, please,” said Temperance softly, fingering the makeshift tourniquet on the girl’s arm, even though Lacey was clearly thinking the same thing: there’s a lot more meat on those bones…)
“We should feast,” said Temperance now, in higher spirits. “We haven’t even had dinner yet, right, Lace—”
“You should have had dinner at least an hour ago,” said Patience. “If she’s out this late, Charity, you don’t have to wait for her…”
“Sorry,” Temperance muttered. She had the inescapable feeling this was all her fault.
“Let her sleep,” said Patience, referring to their still bound and passed-out guest. “We can’t slaughter them in that state.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not what we do – anyway, we’ve always got one guest alive during the feast, don’t we? You girls eat something now, and then go to bed. We’ll deal with her in the morning.”
“What if she wakes up before then?” Temperance did not feel remotely ready to go to bed.
“It’s not like she’s going anywhere. Charity, come on…”
Temperance followed them into the kitchen but stayed in the doorway. Neither of them liked her interfering when they were cooking, likely because she wasn’t nearly as good at it and was more liable to cause a disastrous accident than help.
“We should set up a feast for this morning,” she said, the idea suddenly coming to her. “I know we didn’t plan it, but we can set the table like we’re having one and then – well, it’ll be the same as usual. For her.” She indicated their current guest. “She won’t even have to know it’s not when we usually eat. Can never tell what time it is in the dining room, anyway.” There were certain things they did every feast day that they felt had to be the same. Respecting the customs, and all. If it was something they had to do periodically, they might as well make a ritual of it. She was getting excited just thinking about putting together another one. “We can have sort of a pretend feast, like a tea party when we were kids.” She smiled at Lacey, saying this, and her sister nodded enthusiastically.
“Do whatever you want,” said Patience, and Temperance realized how exhausted she was. “It’ll have to be early. You girls, I swear…”
Temperance wouldn’t have been able to sleep under these conditions even if she had gone to bed at a reasonable hour the previous night. She helped Lacey move their guest to the usual seat at the table – the guest-of-honor chair, she and Chastity used to call it – bound her hands to the arms of it, kept the table set, and waited.
Lacey and Patience did get a few hours of sleep in, with Temperance retiring to the room she called the studio because it was where she kept all her art projects. Sometimes she’d stay up late in there and they’d let her sleep on the couch frame she was refurbishing with bones, which wasn’t the most comfortable place to sleep but she didn’t mind. She’d slept outside plenty of times before. Occasionally she’d fall asleep there and wake up in her own bed because Lacey had carried her upstairs after finding her, which was nice of her even if she didn’t need to do it.
At about five in the morning they all gathered at the table again, with their guest about ready to wake up. Patience was about ready to head back out to work as soon as they were finished, but Lacey had gotten herself dressed up like she usually did for a feast. Temperance never did the same herself, but she appreciated her sister’s dedication to taking this seriously.
Soon enough their guest woke up and screamed, and the fun could begin.
Patience never liked how they got at these times, losing themselves in the fun of it, dragging things out for their poor guests until they were also on the verge of losing their minds. She wanted things over with as soon as possible, but she still went through with putting together the whole charade of the dinner table every time. Maybe if she participated a little more she’d be able to get some of her own negative emotions out instead of taking them out on her sisters all the rest of the time. She’d never, though, Temperance thought – she was afraid of what would happen if she indulged herself.
“Alright, that’s enough,” said Patience eventually, “don’t torture the poor girl,” and that was their cue to untie her and drag her over to the bucket where her blood would drain after they knocked her in the head. Lacey could do it easily, she always did, but maybe it was the excitable delirium brought on by her own lack of sleep and the chaos of the previous day that gave Temperance the idea that they should let Grandma have this one. She’d seemed so pleased to have an unexpected extra drink of blood last night, they should really keep it going for her…
For a while it seemed like a good idea. It was painfully slow going but Patience agreed to it, she was even getting swept up in the moment of it in a way she rarely allowed herself to be, and the girl was struggling mightily but she kept on swinging, and then suddenly she’d wrestled herself free and was up and on the run.
She crashed straight through the window, which gave a context to the broken window upstairs that Temperance hadn’t given much thought to when she saw it last night – oh, Patience was going to be extra pissed later, having to replace the front door and two windows. But there was no time to worry about that now because she and Lacey had to go after their main course, so Lacey grabbed the saw and Temperance grabbed her knife and they bolted.
Temperance, unencumbered by a heavy weapon, gained on her first, and she really thought she had her. She was so focused on how close she’d gotten, actually seizing the back of her shirt and swiping at her enough to make contact with the blade, that she didn’t realize until too late that she’d run straight out into the road, and then a truck was barreling down on her exactly as she’d worried might take out the previous day’s victims before they made it to her house.
She dropped the girl, letting her scramble away to the side, and her last thought before it was upon her was something like I knew I did something wrong…
The impact was instantaneous and overwhelming. She could feel her skull being crushed and then—
She woke up, gasping, in her own bed.