Chapter 20
The mind can turn on you in isolation. I know, because Joe had once told me about Canadian experiments in solitary confinement and the hallucinations they had produced: points of light which melted like wax tears; elongated frogs swimming into open, yawning mouths; plants with long, creeping roots on which they scuttled upright, walking like bipeds.
He’d been particularly fascinated with the aural hallucinations which had begun after only a few hours of sensory deprivation: gunshots and music boxes and the sound of a phantom choir.
He’d told me he often heard the drone of bees just before he fell asleep, lifting and falling like a tide.
I remind myself of this as a wintry dawn breaks on the fourth day of my confinement.
I’m shivering beneath the blanket, noticing how my breath hangs in the air in a silvery plume when I see the dark shape floating in the corner.
At first it looks like a long black coat hanging on a hook.
Then it shifts, and dread slowly uncoils inside me.
As my eyes adjust, I see that it resembles a huge knot of kelp, dark and tangled.
But it’s not kelp, of course. It’s hair.
A thick wiry clump of it, so long it reaches the floor where it pools like calligraphy scrawled with a fine nib.
I’ll start with your sister. She never liked me.
Acid burns in my chest.
“I am a rational woman,” I tell myself quietly, trying to ignore the shiver in my voice. “I do not allow my imagination to play games with me.”
She is floating toward me, long strands of hair brushing against the floor with a soft, whispery sound. A gurgling noise bubbles from the hollow of her throat, like a blocked drain. Is she laughing?
“I am a rational woman. I do not allow—”
I back away until I hit one of those pillars, pressing against it until I can feel the lines of brickwork pressing into my back.
I am a rational woman. I am a black mass. I grow like a seed.
She is all the way to the ceiling now, her hair falling over me like vines. I imagine it choking me, threading into my nostrils and plugging my throat, boiling out of my mouth in coarse black strands. I’m panicking, unable to move. My breathing is fast and shallow, like a cornered animal.
He’s keeping you hungry. He did it to the others. Hunger makes you too weak to think straight, too weak to run.
I look up—I can’t help it, I’m afraid not to look at her—and catch a glimpse of flesh within that nest of hair.
A lumpy, pale knot that might be a face.
Long, sinewy limbs that make me think of umbilical cords, intestines.
I open my mouth to scream when another sound catches me off guard.
The rattle of the key in the cellar door. Andrew is home.
His footsteps slowly make their way down the stairs. He is whistling that flat, four-note melody between his teeth, cheeks flushed with the cold. I can smell the outside as if he is dragging it behind him—hoarfrost and diesel, dead leaves.
“Snow coming.” Andrew steps into the cellar, his eyes shifting this way and that. “I read it in the paper.” He looks around the room frowning, as if expecting to see something. It’s a feeling I know well.
My twin has disappeared the way she tends to when other people are around. I’ve seen her melt into dark corners or pour herself into plugholes like thick black tar. When I was a little girl, she used to crouch beneath my bed, poking her fingers into my back like knots and burls.
“Must be a problem with the septic tank. It smells like a beach when all the dead things have washed in down here.”
He holds something out to me.
At first I think it is a length of metal pipe, but when I look closer I realize it is a flask, the thermal kind. I hear the hollow slop of liquid inside as I take it carefully from him. My stomach growls noisily.
“It’s soup,” he tells me as I twist off the lid.
Is it my imagination or am I weaker than I was?
Everything aches. I feel rawboned, shattered.
He’s keeping you hungry, she’d said, and maybe there was something in that after all because I feel like I might just faint clean away if I don’t get some food inside me right now.
Andrew watches as I take a cautious sniff.
“It’s vegetable. You’re vegetarian, right?”
I nod slowly although right now I’d happily eat a raw steak with my hands.
I can see the steam curling up from the mouth of the flask but I’m too impatient to care if it burns my tongue or not.
I take a big sip, tasting salt and heat and a watery, indefinable broth.
Immediately I recognize the bland taste of this soup, just like I do the blankets and the detergents used to wash them.
They’re all from the same place. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed before.
“You look pale, Hazel.”
“I’m sick.” I take another sip. I’ve had this plan in my head for hours, ever since Maria had passed that crumpled receipt under the door, and now it’s all gone to shit because all I can think about is how long I can make this fucking soup last. “I need my medication.”
I take another gulp. Another. Never thought canned soup could taste this good.
Andrew folds his arms. “What medication?”
I force myself to lower the flask and meet his pale eyes.
There are so many weak joints in the framework of this plan, it might as well be made of wishes and prayers.
What if he doesn’t believe me? What if Maria has already told him she gave me the receipt?
What if he doesn’t have a pen? What if he refuses? What then?
“It’s called Leprazine. I’m meant to take two pills a day. If I don’t, bad things happen.”
He tilts his head. Humoring me, maybe. “What kind of bad things?”
A mass of skin and bone and hair. No teeth.
“I just need them, Andrew. They help me regulate my emotions.”
That’s not strictly what the doctor had said. Her actual words were: These will help you separate fact from fiction. She’d looked at me over her glasses as she’d said it, speaking slowly as if I were a child.
“Well, I don’t know what you want me to do about it, Hazel. It’s not like I can go file a prescription for you.”
“Oh shit.” I let my shoulders slump. It’s an act, though.
I already knew there was no way Andrew would take my prescription into the chemist. If the police are out there looking for me, then a document like that, with my name and address printed right there at the top of it, will raise the alarm.
It’s too identifying. Still, I try to look disappointed.
“You know, a lot of that pharmaceutical medicine is just sugar. I read it online. It’s just placebos. The real healing is what goes on up here.” He taps his skull with a dirty fingernail.
“Is that right?”
“You should read some of this stuff, Hazel. It’ll blow your mind. Maybe you’re better off without all those drugs in your system. Could be I’m doing you a favor, huh?”
I clench my teeth and smile, hoping it doesn’t look as much like a grimace as it feels. The light shifts and darkens. Outside, the sky is gunmetal gray, sagging close to the treetops. Snow coming, he’d said. Andrew looks up toward the window, his eyes never quite still.
“Well, maybe if you can’t get me the pills, you could ask the pharmacist about the half-life of them for me. Do you know what that means?”
He doesn’t answer. His gaze has moved away, and now it is simply as if I am not there.
I fidget. I look at the flask in my hand.
I couldn’t drink it now even if I wanted to.
There is a hard knot of anxiety in my throat that makes it hard to swallow.
I force myself to count slowly to ten before I speak again.
“The half-life means how long until the medication is out of my system. Some meds have a short half-life, no more than a few hours. Some are much longer.” I think of that pale bag of skin, lumpy, like it was full of knuckles.
The long tangled hair. She is already growing. “I just want to be prepared.”
“Write it down for me and I’ll look it up on the internet when I next go into town.
” His gaze remains fixed outside, to the trees and the grass and the vast caliginous sky.
I shake my head as I cross over to where he is standing and touch him on the arm.
The feeling of his skin—cold, clammy, milky smooth—fills me with a disgust so visceral I almost throw up all that soup.
But I make sure I hold it there. I make sure he feels it when I gently squeeze, as if we are two conspirators, as if we are friends.
“No,” I tell him. “That’ll take too long. I need my pills today. Besides, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. If you get it wrong it could make things worse. Please help me, Andrew. I want to get these devils out of my head.”
He looks down at my hand, then slowly lifts his eyes to my face. His breath is dry and sour. “What were the pills called again?”
“Have you got a pen? I’ll write it down for you.”
He continues to study me, unsmiling. Close up, I see flecks of gold in his irises, like mica-studded sunbaked rocks. That feeling—that he can read my mind and see the plan writ clean and broad across it—intensifies until I think I will suffocate. My blood roars in my ears like a jet engine.
I blink, offer him a smile. Please, I think. Please.
“Sure.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his anorak, producing a black ballpoint pen. I take it with numb fingers, hoping he doesn’t notice how much I am shaking. The pen has the name of the local garage printed along the side in gold.
“Don’t take this into the pharmacy in the shopping center,” I tell him as I turn away and carefully produce the receipt from my pocket.
It is a move I have been practicing in the hours before he came home.
I have to be careful, because the paper is only just dry.
I can’t tear it or crumple it or make it too smooth.
It has to be just right. It has to be. “Take it into Idless, where we met. They’re old school, which means they’re less likely to ask too many questions. ”
I print the word Leprazine across the top of the paper, clear and legible. At the bottom, in the lower right corner, I add a small circle in which I print two dots and a curved, smiling mouth. I don’t try to hide it. There’s no point. One way or another, he’ll see it.
“You’d better hurry,” I tell him as I hand it over. “You want to get back before it starts to snow.”
He sees the smiley face. “Cute.”
It’s all he says. I almost don’t believe it, watching him pocket that receipt.
I felt sure he would sense something wrong or feel the crumpled texture of the paper that would give me away.
Even as he turns away and trudges back up the stairs, I can’t relax, not quite.
Panic is still burrowing into me, a sharp-toothed little mammal. I don’t know if it will ever stop.