by Margaret Killjoy
Zine #58—October 2026
Listen to an audio feature and interview with the author on the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast.
The devil lives at the bottom of Gossett’s Gorge. All us kids know it, which means all the parents must too, because they were kids once themselves. Knowing where the devil lives doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d ever forget.
I would have told you I wasn’t afraid of the devil, but I would have been lying, and the proof of it was that I’d never spent the night at the devil’s shack overlooking the gorge. I’d never crawled down that rope ladder, the spindly one that’s all fucked up and threadbare that goes right out over the edge. I’d never seen no one else stay the night or climb down either, and probably I would have gotten old like my parents without having ever done it. I would have, until Penny moved here to Mountain Springs. Until her stupid tagalong brother got taken. It wasn’t my fault.
I was fourteen years old in 1994. Kurt Cobain had just died and not one of us believed it was suicide. A grunge girl moved from the city to the house next door on my country road, and she had the right flannel, the right jeans, and a Mudhoney shirt. I’d never even heard of Mudhoney, but I was sure they were about to become my new favorite band. She was a year older than me, she never smiled, she never brushed her hair, and she was perfect in every way. Assuming she liked girls.
Her parents called her Samantha, and her middle school brat of a brother Chris called her Sam, but she told me her name was Penny and I wasn’t going to argue with a girl like her about something so meaningless as a name.
If you show another kid the ropes around here, you gotta mean it literally. You gotta show em the Three Trees up on Spineback, which are fat doug firs as old as God that’ve got rope bridges strung between. You gotta tell em how every two years or something, some kid falls to their death, usually drunk, usually kids from out of town. Every time it happens there’s a big fuss and someone takes the ropes down. Every time, the ropes go back up, and no one is sure who puts them up. You gotta show them the knots, because they’re weird knots, knots like no one else really knows how to tie, overly-elaborate. You gotta call them devil’s knots, too, if you want to sound spooky.
After you dare them to climb up after you into the Three Trees, you gotta take em to Sandy Creek. Nothing spooky about it, it’s just that there’s this squat old willow with a rope swing that’s been there for a hundred years but you can swing out into the widest, deepest, best part of the creek and it’s half the reason it’s alright to live in Mountain Springs.
Only then, after they’ve seen what’s good in town, do you take em to the devil’s shack. No one ever dies at the devil’s shack, you can assure your guests. No one ever dies there because no one ever stays the night, and no one ever climbs down that ladder. It’s the safest place in town if you respect that it’s evil.
The devil’s shack is just a little carriage house, like a big garage, and a single room adjacent. It’s all timber framed and wood paneled and it ain’t insulated for nothing, but I guess the devil doesn’t need to keep warm because the devil makes things warm.
I showed Penny the ropes. Chris came along, because of course he did. That’s what brats do. It’s no more right to be mad at a brat for tagalong than it’s right to be mad at a squirrel for stupid or a devil for death. Chris climbed the Three Trees, and he swung into Sandy Creek, and he kept being there when I wanted to talk to Penny about important stuff like if there was a grunge scene in Portland or, you know, her opinions on the current popularity of bisexuality among teenage girls.
The thing is, I saw Penny and I saw my chance at a perfect summer. Maybe a perfect life, but I couldn’t think that far ahead. I saw her and I riding our bikes down every trail on Spineback and finding every secluded glade. I saw her dark blue eyes and her messy brown hair close to my face. I saw us making pinkie swears that escalated to bloodsworn pacts. I saw us stealing a car and getting away with it. Hell, I saw us running away to Portland. Or staying in Mountain Springs. I didn’t care.
I’m telling you all this because I know how it sounds, because you probably saw the news reports about Chris. Maybe with everything else I’m telling you, you’re going to reach some unkind conclusions about me. Yes, it’s true, I wasn’t upset when Chris wasn’t there all of a sudden. But for fuck’s sake, I was a fourteen year-old girl in love. That kind of shit takes over your brain and makes its own decisions.
When we rode our bikes up the overgrown road to the devil’s shack, and we passed that rusted out little water tower with the old gold spraypaint that says “the devil lives here,” I started saying “devil take you” under my breath. Everyone knows if you say it a hundred times in less than a minute, the devil will do it, he’ll take whoever you’re thinking about. I didn’t even get to forty, though, because I’m not a monster. Nothing that happened was my fault.
“What is this place?” Penny asked, running forward. I couldn’t blame her, it’s a beautiful sight. The carriage house was nothing special, just old, but the one-room shack had the sharpest-peaked ceiling you’ll ever see, and no windows, and it’s right up against the cliff, and it just looks like magic.
“I told you,” I answered. “It’s the devil’s shack.”
“You said the devil lives at the bottom of the gorge,” she said as we went inside. The door was off its hinges again. Every couple of years, someone came by and fixed the place up. Probably some local dad just looking to scare the kids, maybe the same person who put up those rope bridges. But the devil’s shack got trashed pretty quick every time, since, you know, teenagers were around.
There was no back wall, just a ten-foot opening out over Gossett’s Gorge. Wind kicked in through the gap and it hit the cracks in the rafters just right for it to whistle. I was glad—the whistling roof is one of the coolest parts of the shack, but it wasn’t every day you’d get so lucky as to hear it.
“The devil lives at the bottom of the gorge,” I agreed. “This is like his emergency backup spot, in case the gorge gets flooded or an angel comes looking for him down there. I guess.”
“You can’t believe that,” Chris said. He almost never spoke when I was around, because I think he resented me as much as I resented him.
“Of course I believe it,” I said. I didn’t know if I was telling the truth or not. I’m not sure that anyone recounting fables or legends or laws believe they’re telling the truth, they just say the things they’ve heard because that makes them true. “If you don’t believe me, you can climb down there and prove it yourself.”
Chris looked suspiciously at the rope ladder. It really was a death trap, with or without the ghost story. In places, it was as thin as yarn. Other spots looked burned. Some of the rope rungs were ripped off entirely. The ladder didn’t even go all the way to the bottom of the gorge, just down maybe eighty feet before disappearing into a tiny patch of scrawny trees.
He looked back at me, then at his sister, then back at me. A grin cracked across his face, and damn fool kid did it. One second he was standing there, the next he wasn’t.
“Chris!” Penny shouted, down into the echo of the gorge.
“Riss!” the gorge shouted back.
I knew right then and there that I was more scared of not impressing Penny than I was of death or ghost stories. So I looked at her and I grinned the same dumb way that dumb Chris had dumb grinned.
I got on that rope ladder and started down. It took all my concentration to keep from panicking. A gust of wind moved me and the ladder several feet, and I clenched my teeth and my fists and kept climbing.
The cliff wasn’t completely vertical, thankfully, and in spots it was more like I was scrambling down a hill than just clinging for dear life.
I reached the end of the ladder, but there was no sign of Chris. Not in the trees, not on the one-foot ledge they grew out of.
“I don’t see him!” I shouted up. Penny was already on her way down.
That’s when I noticed the cave.
Caves never have the kind of entrances you’d think they would. All the caves I’ve ever found or seen in the coastal range of Oregon were exposed to the world only by tiny little cracks and slivers and holes in the stone.
“Chris!” I shouted into the darkness. My voice echoed, a long ways back.
Penny landed beside me.
That’s when we heard the scream. Clear as a summer lake, we heard the scream. Loud as a waterfall, we heard the scream.
“Chris!” Penny shouted, then crawled into the darkness on her hands and knees.
I counted down from three to work up my nerve, but it didn’t work. I counted down from ten. At one, I crawled in after.
For a hundred feet or more, we sloshed and slogged through mud and darkness on our hands and knees. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw the pale yellow flicker of firelight ahead and pretty quick I reached this place inside myself that was beyond fear. Like, anything could be ahead of us and it wasn’t going to be good, but somehow crawling forward felt like the only possible option.
A sharp rock caught my shoulder, tore my favorite Nirvana shirt and my skin, and I kept crawling.
After a hundred feet or a million years we came out into a big open cave room. Three lanterns in a triangle on a natural shelf—an altar, I knew it without question—cast shadows more markedly than they cast light, and the whole room danced with fire and darkness.
No one was there.
Empty bottles were there, and empty cans of food, and the walls were painted up in teen graffiti, and a bare mattress sat on the ground inexplicably enough. All that was usual for every strange nook and cranny teenagers can sneak into to drink and fuck. There were other things, though, worse things. Inexplicable things. The skin of some animal nailed to a piece of plywood, rotting in a corner. A hunk of human hair, red and gray, stuck to the wall with some kind of paste. A wind chime of bones. Large bones. Horse, cow, deer, human, I couldn’t have told you. A wand, a raw chunk of quartz held to a stick with pine tar.
What caught my eye and held it, though, was a painting on the altar. It was on canvas, crudely stretched, and it was beautiful and to me it looked ancient. In an expert hand, someone had painted sixteen figures in a forest of fir. I counted them. Sixteen figures, most in shadows, some in light, all caught in religious ecstasy. The men were nude, the women were clothed, and one clothed figure bore a mouth full of fangs. All of them were dancing like how people at a winery dance on the grapes, and they were covered to their shins and thighs in dark red juice but they were just tramping on the ground in the forest. Like the earth itself was giving up blood.
I stared and stared at that woman, with her mouth full of teeth. She looked like me. Not exactly like me. Just enough. Red hair. Freckles. Weird nose, weak chin, bright eyes. She had broader shoulders than me, though, and a higher forehead, and gray in her hair, and of course that mouth full of fangs.
Penny was screaming, frantic, searching for her brother, and I was staring at… look I have no way of proving this, I have no way of convincing you I’m telling the truth… I was staring at my father’s mother’s grandmother.
“Hold my belt,” Penny said, breaking my trance. I looked up wide eyed and confused. Penny had one of the three lanterns in her hand, and she’d pulled off the belt from her jeans, had one end wrapped around her fist.
“What?” I asked.
“There’re other passages. Only one’s big enough for anyone to get through I think. Chris has to be there. What if he fell, in the dark. Oh God. What if he fell in the dark. But it’s slippery, and it goes downhill, I don’t want to slip. You hold me here and I think I can get far enough to peer around the corner.”
Caves don’t make sense. I can’t say “corner of the room” because it wasn’t really a room and it didn’t really have a corner, but I walked to the corner of the room and braced myself against the wall and held onto Penny’s belt and she slipped down a passageway with a devil’s lantern. A moment later, I helped haul her back up.
“It’s just… more. More cave. I don’t know. What if he fell in the dark?”
She started mumbling, then. Just over and over. What if he fell in the dark.
And I couldn’t tell her he didn’t, because looking around the room, fell in the dark was about the best case scenario. I saw him buried in the earth so that cultists or witches or demons could tramp on the soil and his blood would bubble up onto their shins and thighs.
“We’ll go for help,” I said.
Penny nodded, numb, and we crawled back out of that cave together without Chris. I should have been worrying about Chris, or maybe I should have been worrying about Penny, but I was thinking about my great great great and her gray red hair and her teeth and the blood of the earth all splashed around and her teeth and I was thinking about her teeth.
It wasn’t two hours later before we got back there with help. Firefighters, mostly, with some cops trying to boss them around but too afraid to climb down the cliff. It was only two hours later before the cave was crawling with firefighters and four hours before a helicopter was cruising as low as it could in the gorge searching the river and its banks. As the sun set, our neighbors started combing the woods. By the next day professional cave rescue people, I don’t know what you call that job, they declared the cave clear, and some other people started dredging the river.
They didn’t find nothing in the woods but John the Hermit—people call him a bum but he’s a hermit and he only comes into town on Christmas eve on his bicycle to buy supplies, and when he does he leaves dried flowers at every doorstep for ten miles in every direction. They arrested him.
They didn’t put cuffs on him, but they arrested him all the same, and he looked at the sheriff and he smiled big and said “the devil take you” as they put him in the car. In the end they didn’t charge him for Chris but I guess he put up a fuss at the station when they tried to put him in a cage. Resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, obstruction of justice, and his defense in court was telling the judge “the devil take you” and that’s the last anyone saw John the Hermit, and we’re all the poorer without the flowers.
They didn’t find nothing in the river but trash and bones, and they were human bones, but they were old, from the twenties or thirties maybe. They weren’t Chris, so maybe human bones in the river would have been news some other month but we forgot about those bones soon off.
The real thing though, the real weird thing that fucked up my head and didn’t do my sense of reality any good was that they didn’t find anything in the cave, either. Anything. No lanterns, no wind chimes, no mattress. No graffiti. No painting. No Chris.
They took me and Penny to the doctor and they split us up and made us each tell our story to him over and over again until neither one of us had it straight and so some of the details didn’t line up, and I think if my Mom hadn’t come in screaming he would have put us both up in padded rooms.
The doctor was from out of town, an expert. His skin was as white as the moon, his hair whiter than the sun reflecting off the water. He was so white you could see the veins under his skin and somehow they looked white too. His teeth were white, his clothes were white, the office he was working out of was white, and he was fucking terrifying. He held power over me so casually, threatened me so casually.
For nights after, I thought about that doctor’s office as much as I thought about that cave. Two places where I almost lost my mind. Two places where I was standing on the edge like Penny standing at that passageway, trying not to fall, clinging to the belt for her life. In the cave at least we’d had each other; in the doctor’s office it was just me and that man looking at each other, him trying to decide what was real and what wasn’t and whether I belonged in a padded room or whether my head and my memories were prison enough.
That’s how I wrote about it, anyway, in my journal. I liked to call them song lyrics, but let’s be real it was poetry and shitty poetry at that, but let’s be real it was just me trying to get those things out of my head.
What if Chris fell, in the dark?
Penny wasn’t allowed to see me, after that.
The doctor wouldn’t let me on the search teams, said I wasn’t healthy enough. He wanted me inside. I didn’t see why his opinion should have any bearing on the matter, but my mom apparently did, so I wasn’t on a search team.
My mom was working from home that summer, writing handwritten thank you letters on the behalf of politicians. Her and I weren’t real close but I spent a couple days helping her cook dinner and fix things around the house and the property and just kind of living in her shadow because I didn’t want to be alone.
“Where’s grandma from?” I asked my mom while she was changing the oil on the station wagon and I was holding the flashlight. “I mean, dad’s mom.”
See, I’d never met my dad’s mom before. She died of leukemia before I was born.
“Chicago,” she said.
“That’s where she was born? Where were her parents from?” I asked.
“Ohio.”
“Before that?”
“Mostly Scottish I think.”
“But did they ever live out here?”
“No, of course not.”
I knew if I dug too much further she’d start asking why I was asking, and I wasn’t going to talk to her about the painting, because I didn’t want to get locked up. I had to be careful. It was awful, not trusting my mom. But that doctor. What if she told the doctor?
It didn’t make sense. The painting, the cultists, Chris disappearing. None of it, nothing, made sense.
What if I fell in the dark?
The third night after it happened, I was lying in bed praying to the devil. “Please give him back,” I was saying. Everyone knows if you say it a hundred times in less than a minute, he has to do it. Problem is, he does it on his own timeline. And in his own way.
I decided to cover all my bases, so I prayed to the devil, and I prayed to God, and I went back and forth with both until I wasn’t always sure which I was doing.
I was praying to the devil though when the pebbles hit my window, and I went to look out and there was Penny in the side yard, like sneaking out at night wasn’t a big deal, like there wasn’t a devil out there stealing children or a cop out there stealing hermits or a doctor out there threatening to steal us from each other and our families. She waved me down.
I popped out the window screen as quiet as I could and crossed over into the pine just outside. I love a pine tree, because they’re built like ladders. Sticky ladders.
“Hey,” I whispered when I reached the ground.
“Let’s go,” she said. She handed me a flashlight.
I didn’t ask where. I knew where. We got on bikes and took off, only turning on our lights when we were safely away from where our parents might see.
“Have you been having nightmares?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, even though I hadn’t. I don’t even know why admitting to nightmares would have been impressive, but I found myself saying it anyway. “Well, no. I haven’t been sleeping well enough to dream.”
“I’ve been having nightmares,” she said.
“What are they?”
“It’s Chris. He’s down there still. He fell, in the dark. In my dreams, he’s drinking from a little stream, and he’s eating moss and crickets, and he’s scared.”
“What about the graffiti, and the bones, and the painting?” I asked. “I… hate to say it but I think he got kidnapped. I think a cult was living down there, and they snuck out while we were getting help, and they cleaned it all up. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Maybe we didn’t see all that stuff,” Penny said. “Maybe the doctor was right.”
I skidded my bike to a halt. Penny stopped too, looking back at me, confused.
“That doctor is not right. Not about what happened to us. Not about anything.”
Penny was crying. She came over. We walked our bikes to the side of the road and sat down, and she put her head onto my shoulder, and she cried a little more.
“Okay,” she said.
“We’ve got to believe ourselves,” I said. “We saw what we saw. They’re telling us we didn’t because they don’t want it to be true. Because it doesn’t make sense. But it was there.”
“I’ll believe you, if you believe me,” Penny said.
“What do you need me to believe?” I asked.
“Chris is still alive.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll believe you.”
“I believe you too,” she said. “We saw all that stuff we saw.”
“I almost wish you didn’t.”
The moon was waning but large and we cast moonshadows across the road, and we sat like that for a while before we kept biking to the devil’s shack.
The ladder was gone, but Penny had rope and we climbed down to the cave. We crawled in, and with flashlights and rope we searched more and more of the cave. Nothing. No one. Some soot, though, above the altar, was enough for me to believe myself. We’d seen what we’d seen.
On the altar in the first room, Penny left water and a peanut butter and jelly and potato chip sandwich. It didn’t make sense, but I didn’t argue. We crawled out of the cave, and we climbed back up to the devil’s shack, where you’re not supposed to go at night.
We stood in the shack and looked out over the gorge, and I didn’t know what the devil was and I didn’t know where he lived but maybe he lived in the gorge or maybe no one did.
We got back on our bikes and made it home just as birds started calling out, and I saw my dad leave the house and get into his truck on his way to work, his headlights cutting the rising fog of the morning. I scrambled up the pine and crawled into bed, every bit of me sore and cut and covered in mud and sap.
We went back the next night, and in the room, the main room with the altar and everything, only the crust remained of the sandwich.
“He’s alive,” Penny declared, and this time I didn’t have to work at it to believe her. “He hates the crust.”
“If we tell our parents,” I said.
“They won’t believe us,” Penny agreed. “Right to the padded room.”
“What do we do?”
“We find him,” Penny said.
We didn’t find him that night, though we spent hours in the cave. I crawled into bed at dawn.
Two weeks passed that way. Every night the sandwich was eaten. Penny left notes, each one taken. Penny left a pen and paper, but no message was ever written for us. We searched every inch of the cave we could reach. There were a few cracks too narrow even for us scattered around the place. There was a hole, the devil’s hole, that I could probably have fit down that went down and down and down but there was nowhere good to tie a rope.
We talked about spending the day in the cave, but our parents would notice us missing, freak out, send authorities, and we’d get dragged off to an institution without ever having found him.
Finally, on our fifteenth trip—we marked tallies on the paper we left—Penny told me her parents were going to have a funeral. In Portland. They were giving up and moving. Tomorrow.
“We have to tell your parents,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if we get locked up, if they find him.”
“No,” Penny said. “We have to find him.”
This time, she brought rock pitons and more rope. She’d shoplifted it all from the adventure sports store the next town over. She’d hitchhiked there. Fuck, she was perfect.
We made our way to the devil’s hole. Penny wouldn’t fit, so she helped me into a harness. She hammered pitons into cracks in the wall, and the noise was louder than anything had a right to be, each strike like a gunshot. She tied the rope to it, and that was maybe enough to keep me safe.
“Ready?” she asked.
I nodded, and lowered myself into the hole. Head first, I decided. Fuck it. Better to see what’s coming.
It was like crawling vertically, in parts. Other parts I slid as Penny fed more rope. I went down. And down. And down.
The white noise of water rose up from below me. The hole went to the bottom of the gorge, I was certain.
I went down and down and then my flashlight caught a crystalline wall and the world exploded into light and suddenly my head broke free into a huge open chamber over a river. I braced myself as best I could, then gave one tug on the rope. One tug for stop, two for bring me up.
Crystals covered the walls, or maybe the walls themselves were crystals, or the entire world, entire universe, was those crystals, and there were facets to everything and everything caught the light. Everything shone.
There was a ledge jutting out from the wall, down close to the river, and there was the painting, and there was the hair, and there were bones and skins and crystals. No one was there, but I saw figures everywhere I looked.
I’d barely slept for weeks, my mind was torn apart by trauma, and peering into that room I had an epiphany, or I broke, or the devil broke me.
While I watched the water and the light, and God or the devil flowed through the chamber, I watched three people emerge, wading in the water. None of them was Chris. Two women and a man. Teenagers, maybe five years older than me. One had a Slayer shirt, and they were fifty feet below me and they had lanterns, one each, and they were laughing. I couldn’t hear them over the water but I could see their faces and they were laughing and they were passing a bottle and one held the crystal wand aloft. They waved at me, and they passed through the chamber, up the river out the other side.
Two tugs, and Penny lifted me up, which took longer than I’d been alive. My head swam with thought and non-thought.
I tried to describe what I’d seen to Penny, but once she heard I hadn’t seen Chris she stopped listening, like I’d knocked the wind out of her.
We made it back to the first room, and she went somberly to the altar to leave the night’s sandwich.
Someone had written “The Three Trees” on the paper, while we’d been there.
Penny grabbed the paper, folded it, and put it in her pocket. She turned to me, her eyes alight. “Chris’s handwriting,” she said. “I used to copy it when I did his homework for him.”
I was still reeling from the room at the bottom of the devil’s hole and the world was upside down from where it had been and all of a sudden I realized it wasn’t about me. None of this was about me. It wasn’t about impressing Penny. It wasn’t even about Penny, not really. It was about Chris. It was about finding that kid and making sure he didn’t die and making sure there were so many more years in front of him where he could talk his big sister into doing his homework and there were so many years of eating sandwiches and just living life not in a fucking cave in the bottom of Gosset’s Gorge and just…
“We have to find him,” I said, and for the first time I really meant it, not for my sake not even for Penny’s sake.
“No shit,” she said.
We made it out of the cave and up to our bikes but the sun was already on its way over the mountains.
“Shit,” Penny said. “My parents said we were gonna leave at dawn.”
“They’ll know you’re gone.”
“This is the first place they’ll look,” she said.
We got to our bikes and started up the trail but it wasn’t long before we heard people coming from in front of us and we ducked into the trees.
Penny’s parents, and that sheriff, the one who’d stolen John the Hermit, the only person I’d ever seen actually steal a person with my own eyes.
We waited breathless for them to pass then hurried to the road. It was an hour on bike to the Three Trees, and we got there in forty-five. The sun was over the mountains now, filtered through the forest. The ropes hung like they always hung, knotted strange, down from the boughs of the trees.
I hurried up the rope, and Penny came after.
There was the tagalong, sitting calm as death on the platform, covered with mud and pine, whistling a dissonant tune.
“Chris,” Penny said.
He didn’t stop whistling, and Penny sat down next to him.
“Chris,” Penny said. He didn’t respond.
She freaked out. I didn’t blame her. “Chris!” she shouted, pounding his chest with her fists.
I sat across from him, and I looked into his eyes, and they caught light like crystals.
“I saw the devil’s chamber,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
Chris looked at me, and stopped whistling.
“Did you see the devil’s maidens? The three?” he asked.
“Penny thought you fell,” I said, instead of answering, “in the dark. But you didn’t, did you?”
“I was rescued,” he said.
“By the maidens.”
“By the maidens,” he agreed. “They took me to the chamber and I saw the light and I heard the water and I went under the water. I learned the truth. The devil is real, and we are his maidens, and for as long as there’s been a world there’s been the devil.”
“The painting?” I asked.
“As long as there’s been a world there’s been a devil, as long as there’s been a devil there’s been his maidens. We are, each of us, the devil’s maidens. A million names, a million meanings, a million cultures, but a devil, a devil, a world, a world, a maiden, a maiden, and blood.”
I nodded.
“Is that what you’ll be?” I asked. “A servant to the devil?”
“Yes,” he answered. He looked at me. “Will you?”
When he asked me, I felt like I was still dangling in that room of light. I’d never felt more real, more connected to everything, to my body, to death, than I had in that moment.
“Yes. I will be the devil’s maiden.”
“Will you tie the knots that hold the trees?” he asked.
“I will.”
“Will you fix the door that holds us warm?” he asked.
“I will.”
“Will you guard the room that sings of the river and light?” he asked.
“I will.”
“For all time?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“No?”
“Look at me, Chris,” I said. Chris looked at me. “I will be the devil’s maiden, same as you, same as those three, but that’s not all I’ll be. I’ll be myself, too.”
“You’re allowed to do that?” He was suddenly a child again.
“We’re allowed to do anything we want,” I told him. “The devil isn’t real. God isn’t real. The world is real, and we are real, and we can serve anything we’d like. We can serve God, the devil, the earth, ourselves, each other.”
“You served me,” Chris said. “For these past two weeks, you served me.”
“Penny did,” I said. “I served her. No, I served myself. I should have been serving her, or you, but it’s all the same, too.”
Penny put her arm around her brother, and he collapsed into her, crying. Whatever spell had held him was broken.
“I want to go home,” he whispered.
“Then we’ll go home,” Penny said.
I didn’t see Penny for three days after that. The reunion was kind of all-consuming for her family. But on the fourth day, late in the evening, she met me at my front door, and she had sleeping bags.
“Tell your parents you and I are going camping,” she said.
“I don’t know if my mom will let me,” I said.
“Okay, then don’t tell them,” she answered.
“Mom, I’m going camping with Penny! Be back tomorrow!” I shouted, then Penny grabbed my hand and the two of us took off running before my mom could stop us.
If she really wanted, she could have found us. She could have figured out where we were going. We went to the devil’s shack.
This time, Chris didn’t come with us.
We went to the devil’s shack, and the rafters were whistling. They were whistling that dissonant tune Chris had been singing.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“We’re going to meet the maidens,” Penny said. “And thank them for taking care of my brother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I talked to Chris more,” Penny said. “He really had fallen, in the dark. That was the scream we heard. The maidens, they rescued him. Washed his wounds, kept him fed and warm. Brainwashed him a little yeah sure, but they saved his life, and they let him go, too.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Besides,” Penny said, “I think you promised to work with them.”
“Well, maybe a little,” I agreed.
She kissed me on the cheek.
“You’re a charming enough maiden,” she said.
“Tell me,” I asked, once we laid our sleeping bags on the floor of the Devil’s Shack, the one place one must never, ever sleep, “what’s your opinion on the current popularity of bisexuality among teenaged girls?”
About the Author
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, podcaster, and anarchist. Her books include The Sapling Cage, the Danielle Cain Series, A Country of Ghosts, and others, and she is the host of the radical history podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. She can be found avoiding deadlines with her dog in Appalachia or the Rust Belt.