She is malicious.
She is a night-crawler.
Kora put a star, so she’d remember to look up what malicious meant.
Then she sat down, and breathed in the thick, blanketing air, until she was sure the bells had already rung for dinner.
There was no trial period, no transition, not even a full day’s grace. By the next afternoon, the Cambion girl sat smack in the front row of Ramona’s Immaculate Conception and Gestation class, grinning like she’d won. And from that minute on, there was no avoiding her.
With the rapidity of a wasp, Kora found her way to the center of every single classroom’s attention and nested there.
She never did anything openly anarchic, but the atmosphere was the same as if she started a trash can fire at the beginning of every lecture. She sat with such scarily unblinking attention, and scribbled with such composer-like intensity, that she could dissolve a class into nervous, murmuring giggles without saying anything at all.
Once she grew bold enough to ask questions, all was lost.
Sometimes she semi-automaticked them, not even bothering to put her hand all the way down between rounds. “Ramona, is that a picture of a real faun fetus or half-faun, like Aiden Averback? Can I hold it? Can you make it bigger? Can I make it bigger? Ramona, do the horns hurt when they come out? No, not out of his head, out of the mama’s vagina? What if it’s a girl, and she has curly ones?”
The dull roar that built up behind these solid walls of questions could never be kept back until the class was over. And the class was instantly over once it started.
“Kora,” Ramona managed one day after a particularly unsuccessful lab. “I think it would be best if you reserved your questions for after class.”
“But I raise my hand.”
“Adult students with too many questions have to keep quiet during class time, and ask their questions later, during office hours.”
“Oh,” she said, eyes shining with the dangerous knowledge. “Okay.”
From that day forward, Kora Gillespie was as silent as she could be in the classroom. But in the halls and cloisters between classes, she was an unrelenting storm of chatter, as close on Ramona’s heels as an overexcited duckling. Office hours were now entirely taken up by the seven-year-old’s undauntedly one-sided conversation. Twice, the Cambion followed her straight back to graduate housing and up into her living room without even a pause.
But Ramona had already determined that she would make herself too busy to annoy, burrowing deep into the work of constructing her Sant Ramon program design. Even Kora could be ignored, if you typed feverishly enough.
It was a plan that worked wonderfully well, until the dreams started.
Kora Gillespie was seeping into her dreams. She wasn’t having dreams about Kora Gillespie. Kora Gillespie was walking around in her dreams.
She’d emerge from the very back of the closet in a kissing dream decades old. Or she’d be looking over Ramona’s shoulder while Ramona answered the essay portion of a dream-exam in gibberish. Or she’d be hovering above Ramona as Ramona fell backward into dream-blackness, a pale, thin, inscrutable, smirking face, just before she started awake in bed.
It was almost certainly some kind of inheritance from the thing that was her father, this casual strolling in and out of dreams. If it hadn’t been happening to her, Ramona might have called it interesting, and taken notes. But almost every night, she woke feeling that the ghost-white girl was standing just in her blind spot, or that she was just in the other room getting ready to make something burn.
Ramona never confronted her invader. She had a vague, belligerent idea that if she didn’t acknowledge the game, the fun of tromping all over her brain would more quickly dissipate. But she now was hyper-aware of the girl. Her every breath, and greasy fingerprint, and shuffling step, and stupid question.
“Why don’t I look like anything?” Kora asked inanely one day.
“Look like anything?”
“The other Superum kids all have tails and scales and horns and things like their dads.”
“You’re fortunate not to look like your father, Kora,” said Ramona irritably.
“But maybe if I did, it would be a nice surprise when I talked,” she said, though Ramona had stopped listening.
Ramona had the nightmare one night after a bottle of wine. It was the usual nightmare, certainly nothing more than usual. She was back in that darkened walk-up in Washington Heights, listening to Ms. Gillespie scream.
She stood by herself—no Bernadette in sight—staring down into the dark passage from which she knew the thing was coming. And Ms. Gillespie arched and screamed, raking her nails across her skin, begging with those now-familiar fear-clouded eyes. Stop It! Please stop It! Please take It from me!
We fight the fear, dear, that’s what we do. Ramona would always have Bernadette’s words in her head, but never in her mouth. I can’t! she’d say instead, her voice thin and high and horrible, It’s coming already, I can’t!
And then Ms. Gillespie would roll her eyes up to the ceiling, screaming blindly, almost unconscious. And so Ramona was left by herself to catch the baby when It came bursting out.
But all that came bursting out was black blood, pouring out and pouring out over everything; her hands and arms, the bedsheets, the floor, an amniotic flood that showed no signs of stopping. Had she lost It? Was there any real baby at all? Was it all just a trick of pain and terror and this poisoned blood?
No, she knew by now there had to be a real one somewhere, she’d had this dream so many times. She knelt to find it, sloshing in the blackness.
But she was not alone.
Sitting curled in a dry corner, Kora Gillespie was not staring at the black amniotic lake creeping toward her knees. She was staring at Ms. Gillespie, following Ms. Gillespie’s frozen wide eyes up to the ceiling. “Is it me?” she asked, her voice small and shuddering, barely there. “Is that one mine?”
Her puddle-gray eyes were locked on It, the creature whose presence Ramona had superimposed so long ago she’d almost forgotten It. The Inseminator, tentacles a tight cage around the body of Its victim, suckers affixed while It thrusted and thrusted its knife-like phallus, perhaps seeking to make an opening where it failed to find one. Finishing, It blinked several guiltless eyes.
The Cambion looked away, crumpling, shuddering. And Ramona remembered something that she often forgot: Kora Gillespie was a child.
Don’t pay any attention to that, she heard herself say. That part’s done, that part’s over. There’s only you left.
Baby Kora suddenly came alive in Ramona’s arms, this time not soundlessly. Ms. Gillespie wakened screaming, as in life, recoiling from the small thing that came out of her, and took her leap from the fire escape.
Kora stared a moment at the screaming, squirming blood-covered byproduct, paralyzed against the wall. Then she twisted away and fled, leaving the way of her birth-mother.
When Ramona woke, she needed no one to tell her that Kora Gillespie was missing.
Down, and down, there was always more down. No place to sleep. She’d keep walking until the rail tracks ended…Kora wished more than anything she could stop carrying the stupid pictures.