“I can’t find anything to block the door with,” Noah wailed back at me with the exact same-sounding voice I had, one laced with terror. “I can’t see a damn thi—”
We paused in horror as the lights flicked on.
“Nooooo,” I whispered, closing my eyes tightly because I just couldn’t face what was coming. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt as badly if my eyes were closed?
“What are you guys doing?” Mienkie asked.
“Why are you crawling on the floor like that?” Tiaan asked.
Well, this was it, wasn’t it? The end of it. The end of my life, and I couldn’t even remember that much of it anyway. What a waste, that I could only account for a few short years and now it would all be over. I turned slowly, catching Noah’s eye on the way. We both looked towards the door just as a lightning bolt ripped through the sky. We screamed and reached for each other as Tiaan and Mienkie stood silhouetted against the doorway, knives in hand.
“Please don’t kill us. I don’t want to die!” I howled at the top of my lungs.
“Wait! Wait!” Noah stood up and walked in front of me. “Take me and let her go. You can kill me, but you have to let her go.”
“Kill you?” Mienkie asked, coming forward.
“Why would we kill you?” Tiaan also stepped forward.
“You have knives! You have Lucy’s eyes and you’re peeling Susie’s leg!” I shouted at them, peering around Noah, who was now completely blocking me. They shared a look, and then when they glanced back at us, they burst out laughing. Their laughter was so wild and loud and unrestrained. Mienkie was even bent over at the waist and Tiaan rested his hand on a nearby bench to support himself.
“You thought we were killers!” Mienkie howled.
“Well, aren’t you?” Noah asked. “Who are Lucy and Suzy and what are you doing with them?”
“Look around,” Mienkie said.
“Look arou—” I repeated as I turned my head and took in the illuminated room for the first time.
“This is Susie.” Tiaan walked up to a bench and picked up what looked like a ball of fur.
“I do taxidermy. This is the little squirrel that lived in the tree in front of our house for years. We called her Susie, after one of my favorite songs, ‘Susie Q.’ You know it? I used to go out every morning and feed her. And then, one day, she wasn’t there. I went to look for her, and she was dead. I couldn’t bear to bury her, she had been part of our lives here for years, so I thought I would memorialize her.”
“You . . . taxidermy . . . squirrel . . . Susie?” I muttered, trying to make sense of things.
“You know, I get so attached to my animals as a farmer I name them all, and one day, I just thought I’d like to be able to keep them with me when they die. So I learned how to do taxidermy.”
“That’s not weird at all,” I whispered to Noah.
“And Lucy’s eyes?” Noah asked.
Mienkie pointed at a workstation behind us and we both turned. “I’m a reborner.”
“A what?” I asked, staring at a table full of miniature body parts, still not sure what I was looking at.
“I make reborn babies. I make them from scratch, but the eyes are the only thing I can’t make, so I have to order them.”
“But the knife,” I pointed at Mienkie. “It’s covered in blood.”
“Cutting up some red velvet cake! For tea!” She gave me a massive smile with those red-smeared teeth of hers then nudged Tiaan.
“Why do you have so many chainsaws?” Noah asked.
“I rent them out to the farmers close by for some extra money, and I rent out other tools too.” He pointed to the other side of the workshop, and there it was, a whole wall of various power tools. There was a beat in the conversation and everything suddenly went very quiet.
“Can you believe it, liefie, they thought we were serial killers.” And then she and Tiaan laughed again, and Noah and I looked at each other and, this time, our cheeks went as red as the cake on Mienkie’s teeth.
CHAPTER 45
“Well, we simply cannot let you go now that it’s dark,” Mienkie said, looking through the curtains at the world outside. It had stopped raining about an hour ago, but now it was night-time. With the homicidal misunderstanding cleared up, we’d all sat in the lounge together and enjoyed