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The Shining Girls
| Author: | Lauren Beukes |
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Mulholland Books, 2013 |
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| Book Type: | Novel |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
| Sub-Genre Tags: | Alternate History (Fantasy) |
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Synopsis
The Time Traveler's Wife meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in this story of a time-traveling serial killer who is impossible to trace--until one of his victims survives.
In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back.
Working with an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery.
THE SHINING GIRLS is a masterful twist on the classic serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing girl in pursuit of a deadly criminal.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
17 July 1974
He clenches the orange plastic pony in the pocket of his sport coat. It is sweaty in his hand. Midsummer, here, is too hot for what he's wearing. But he has learned to put on a uniform for this purpose; jeans in particular. He takes long strides—a man who walks because he's got somewhere to be, despite his gimpy foot. Harper Curtis is not a moocher. And time waits for no one. Except when it does.
The girl is sitting cross-legged on the ground, her bare knees white and bony as birds' skulls, but also grass stained. She looks up at the sound of his boots scrunching on the gravel and broken glass—long enough for him to see that her eyes are brown under that tangle of grubby curls—before she dismisses him and goes back to her business. Harper is disappointed. His personal preference is for blue, the color of the lake, out where it gets deep, where the shoreline disappears and it feels like you're in the middle of the ocean. Brown is the color of shrimping, when the mud is all churned up in the shallows and you can't see shit for shit.
"What are you doing?" he asks, putting brightness in his voice. He crouches down beside her in the threadbare grass. "Playing?" Really, he's never seen a child with such crazy hair. Like she got spun round in her own personal dust devil, one that tossed up the assortment of random junk splayed around her—a cluster of rusty tin cans, a broken bicycle wheel tipped on its side, spokes jabbing outwards. Her attention is focused on a chipped teacup, turned upside down, so that the silvered flowers on the lip disappear into the grass. The handle has broken off, leaving two blunt stumps. "You having a tea party, sweetheart?" he tries again.
"It's not a tea party," she mutters into the petal-shaped collar of her checked shirt. Kids with freckles shouldn't be so earnest, he thinks. It doesn't suit them.
"Well, that's fine," he says. "I prefer coffee anyways. May I have a cup, please m'am? Black with three sugars, okay?" He reaches for the chipped porcelain, and the girl yelps and bats his hand away. A deep, angry buzzing comes from underneath the inverted cup.
"Jesus. What you got in there?"
"It's not a tea party! It's a circus!"
"That so?" He turns on his smile, the goofy one that says he doesn't take himself too seriously, and neither should you. But the back of his hand stings where she smacked him.
She glares at him suspiciously. Not for who he might be, what he might do to her, but because he's just another dumb grown-up who doesn't get it. He looks around, more carefully, and recognizes it now: her ramshackle circus. The big top ring marked out with a finger-tracing in the dirt; a tightrope made from a flattened drinking straw rigged between two soda cans; the Ferris wheel of the dented bicycle wheel, half–propped up against a bush, with a rock to hold it in place and paper people torn out of magazines jammed between the spokes.
It doesn't escape him that the rock holding it up is the perfect fit for his fist. Or how easily one of those tire spokes would slide right through the girl's eye like Jell-O. He squeezes hard on the plastic pony in his pocket. The furious buzzing coming from underneath the cup is a vibration he can feel all the way down his vertebrae, tugging at his groin.
Just then the cup jolts and the girl clamps her hands over it.
"Woah!" she says, laughing, breaking the spell.
"Woah, indeed! You got a lion in there?" He nudges her with his shoulder, and a smile breaks through her scowl, but just a little one. "You an animal tamer? You gonna make it jump through flaming hoops?"
This time she grins, the constellations of her freckles drawing up into Dutch apple cheeks, revealing bright white teeth. "Nah, Rachel says I'm not allowed to play with matches. Not after last time." She has one skewed canine, slightly overlapping her incisors. And this more than makes up for brackish brown eyes. It gives him that falling-away feeling in his chest. And he's sorry he ever doubted the House. She's the one. One of the ones. The shining girls.
"I'm Harper," he says, feeling breathless, holding out his hand to shake. She has to switch her grip on the cup to do it.
"Are you a stranger?" she says.
"Not anymore, right?"
"I'm Kirby. Kirby Mazrachi. But I'm gonna change it to Lori Star as soon as I'm old enough."
"When you go to Hollywood?"
She draws the cup across the ground towards her, stirring the bug underneath it to new heights of outrage, and he can see he's made a mistake.
"Are you sure you're not a stranger?"
"I mean, the circus, right? What is Lori Star going to do? Flying trapeze? Elephant rider? Clown?" He wiggles his index finger over his top lip. "The moustachioed lady?"
To his relief, she giggles. "Noooo."
"Lion tamer! Knife thrower! Fire-eater!"
"I want to be a tightrope walker. I've been practicing. Wanna see?" She moves to get up.
"No, wait," he says, suddenly desperate. "Can I see your lion?"
"It's not really a lion."
"That's what you say," he prods.
"Okay, but you gotta be real careful. I don't want him to fly away."
She tilts the cup, the tiniest fraction. He lays his head down on the ground, squinting to see. The smell of crushed grass and the black earth is comforting. There is something moving under the cup. Furry legs, a hint of yellow and black. Antennae probe towards the gap. Kirby gasps and slams the cup down again.
"That's one big old bumblebee," he says, sitting back on his haunches.
"I know," she says, smirking.
"You got him pretty riled."
"I don't think he wants to be in the circus."
"Can I show you something? You'll have to trust me."
"What is it?"
"You want a tightrope walker?"
"No, I—"
But he has already lifted up the cup and scooped the agitated bug into his hands. Pulling off the wings makes the same dull pop sound as plucking the stem off a sour cherry, like the ones he spent a season picking in Rapid City.
"What are you doing?" she shrieks.
"Now we just need to replace that straw with some flypaper, string it across the top of the cans. Big old bug like this should be to pull his feet free, but it'll be sticky enough to stop him falling. You got some flypaper?"
He sets the bumblebee down on the rim of the cup. It clings to the edge.
"Why did you do that?" She hits his arm, a flurry of blows, palms open.
He's baffled by her reaction. "Aren't we playing circus?"
"You ruined it! Go away! Go away, go away, go away, go away." It becomes a chant, timed with each slap.
"Hold on. Hold on there," he laughs, but she keeps on whacking him. He grabs her hand in his. "I mean it. Cut it the fuck out, little lady."
"You don't swear!" she yells and bursts into tears.
This is not going like he planned. As much as he can plan any of these first encounters. He feels tired at the unpredictability of children. This is why he doesn't like little girls. This is why he waits for them to grow up. Later, it will be a different story.
"All right. I'm sorry. Look, don't cry, okay. I've got something for you. Please don't cry. Look." In desperation, he takes the orange pony out, or tries to. Its head snags on his pocket and he has to yank it free. "Here," he jabs it at her, willing her to take it. One of the objects that links everything together. Surely this is why he brought it. He feels only a moment of uncertainty.
"What is it?"
"A pony. Can't you see? Isn't a pony better than some dumb bumblebee?"
"It's not alive."
"I know that. Goddammit. Just take it, okay? It's a present."
"I don't want it," she sniffs.
"Okay, it's not a present, it's a deposit. You're keeping it safe for me. Like at the bank when you give them your money. Am I right?" The sun is beating down. It is too hot to be wearing a coat. He is barely able to concentrate. He just wants it to be done. The bumblebee falls off the cup and lies upside down in the grass, its legs cycling in the air.
"I guess."
He is feeling calmer already. Everything is as it is has to be. "Here we go. Now keep this safe, all right? It's real important. I'll be back for it. You understand?"
"Why?"
"Because I need it. How old are you right now?"
"Six and a half."
"That's great. Really great. I'll see you when you're all grown-up. Look out for me, okay, sweetheart? I'll come back for you."
He stands up, dusting his hands against his leg. He walks briskly across the lot, not looking back, limping only slightly.
She watches him cross the road and walk up towards the railway until he disappears into the tree line. She looks at the plastic toy, clammy from his hand, and yells after him. "Yeah? Well I don't want your stupid horse!"
She chucks it onto the ground and it bounces, once, and comes to land beside her bicycle ferris wheel. Its painted eye stares blankly at the bumblebee, which has righted itself and is dragging itself away over the dirt.
But she goes back for it later. Of course she does.
Copyright © 2013 by Lauren Beukes
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