Chapter 22
My other sister hadn’t appeared to me as a monster.
Monsters never do. Look at Andrew, standing there in his stained overalls, or the man who had lived in the house on Beeker Street and kept a tub of ice cream that he wanted to share out back in his freezer.
Look at Joseph Bray, who’d lived right here in this crumbling old farmhouse and told his young children he had something wonderful in the barn to show them, all the while holding an axe behind his back.
Monsters wear the face of conviviality, keeping their sharp teeth hidden until it is too late.
The first time my other sister told me to do something bad was the day I took the scissors to my sister’s hair.
Cathy had been asleep at the time, lying on her side with her beautiful blond hair forming a halo around her head.
The scissors had been big and unwieldy in my small hands as I’d lowered them and begun to hack at it.
It had fallen away from her like drifts of sunlit straw, and when her eyes had flared open in horror, it had made me smile so hard my face ached.
“Don’t give her a hard time, Cathy,” our mother had muttered as Cathy wailed at her broken reflection in the mirror. Half her hair was missing on the left side, snipped right up to the top of her ear. “You know your sister has been through a lot.”
I wasn’t afraid of my other sister when I was little.
Her appearance was as described by the doctor who’d talked to my parents over my small, bowed head as if I wasn’t there at all.
Upon investigation, we discovered a mass of skin and bone and hair, no teeth.
Those words had sunk into my brain—an organ I thought of at the time as a large wad of chewed Wonderland gum, gelatinous and gluey—and spun her into a corporeal form.
At first, she was just a voice, floating through the air like a melody.
She was nice. She made me laugh. I liked when she would sing the funny little five-line songs she called lim-er-ricks, and even though she was mean about Cathy, that was funny too, in a way.
She told me that Cathy was as nasty as a scalded cat, so it was okay to think bad thoughts about her.
My other sister had a lot of bad thoughts about Cathy, and when she did she whispered them to me.
Like the time she told me where to cut the wires on Cathy’s bike so that when she went flying down Shooter’s Hill on her candy-colored Raleigh, she would just keep right on going over the grass bank and into the river.
I’d been reluctant about that one, but then my other sister had told me that sometimes people have to be taught lessons, and sometimes those lessons hurt, and I’d understood.
Cathy hadn’t gone over the bank and into the river—she’d crashed into a parked car at the bottom of the road after picking up a good head of speed on the journey down, her screams trailing her like long ribbons.
She’d needed nine stitches on her head and four in her chin, and all the way home from the hospital, Dad had gone on and on about the importance of wearing a bike helmet, but Cathy had just stared at me like she was trying to work out a puzzle.
Then, the night the snow came, I heard a thump in my bedroom closet.
Cathy had moved out of my room by then, because she said she wanted her own space, so I had the bedroom all to myself.
I looked up from my book and over at the closet.
It was creeping up to lights-out o’clock, but I reckoned I still had a good five minutes of reading time.
I wondered if our cat had got stuck in there.
Mum said he was very old, and that meant he sometimes got lost and confused.
“Gandalf?”
I lowered the book. Thump. Thump. Like something was trying to get out.
“Stupid cat,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. Gandalf was beautiful, and Mum said he was worth Big Bucks, so we all treated him like royalty. There was one more thud as I swung my legs out of the bed and crossed to the closet door, but then it all went quiet. Somehow, that was worse.
I reached for the handle, and the light flickered. It happened sometimes, in bad weather. The wind had been singing through the pines outside in a way that followed me down into murky, restless dreams.
Little pig, little pig, let me come in.
I opened the door, and she was there. My other sister, a black tangled mass.
The smell of her wet and old, like she had crawled out of the sea.
She showed me her eye, runny and yellow as a soft-boiled egg, and the black slit of her gummy mouth with no teeth in it.
I asked her to tell me all the things she heard when they had cut me open, and so she began the way she always does, by saying,
More suction. There. Do you see it?
I’m drifting, half-conscious, when the screaming starts. It is high-pitched and shrill enough to shatter glass. I get moving just as I hear Maria’s feet pounding down the hall, her voice calling my name. “Hay-zal, Hay-zal!”
By the time I reach the locked door at the top of the stairs, I’m dizzy, seeing stars. My stomach is a hard little knot, and I am painfully hungry again.
“Maria? Hey! What’s going on?” I slap my hand against the door. “Maria?”
She’s out there, right outside. I can hear how breathless she is. She’s scrabbling at the padlock, and I wonder if she has somehow got hold of the keys, but then she whimpers, and when the scrabbling stops, the door is still firmly locked.
“There’s something upstairs, Hazel,” she whispers. “In the bath!”
I have an instant memory of Abigail, the skin of her legs raw and peeling, her eyes unfocused, not quite seeing me. She had no face! She had no FACE!
“What’s in the bath, Maria?”
I think it will be an animal. It will be her imagination or the dregs of a bad dream. It won’t be my other sister, not yet. It’s too soon. I need more time.
“I don’t … I don’t know! I heard scratching in there.
I thought maybe it was a trapped bird. We get them sometimes, when they fly in through the holes in the roof.
When I looked inside, I thought the tub was full of nasty black water, but when I put my hand in it—it—” Her voice is climbing higher and higher. “It was all tangly hair!”
I turn cold all over. Behind me, I think I hear a low snicker, a mean little gurgling laugh. I press closer to the door. “Maria, I need you to calm down.”
“It was all over my hands!” she wails, and I think she has started to cry because her voice has become high and breathless. “It felt like cobwebs!”
“Listen to me, Maria. You need to get out of this house, now. Get as far away as you can.”
She sniffs deeply, loud enough for me to hear. “I can’t.”
“Why? Why not?”
Another sniff. I wish I could get out of here and comfort her. She sounds so small, so lost.
“My brother said there’s bad things in the woods.”
Of course he fucking did, I think, and feel a pulse of real anger, jet black.
As I shift position, my eye falls on the wire coat hanger.
After I’d used it to lock the door back up yesterday, I’d stuffed it between the floorboards nearest the door.
I prize it out between my two pinched fingers as Maria draws in another unsteady breath.
It’s not enough on its own, just a piece of twisted wire that can’t magic me out of here, but now I’m thinking about Abigail again, or more specifically, the house on Beeker Street.
I never knew that house to be occupied. To me, it had always loomed dark and haunted, with its overgrown front garden and metal screens over the windows.
The screens had been installed by the council because the neighborhood kids had liked to pelt the glass panes with rocks.
The council had also put up signs—WARNING!
NO ENTRY! and UNSAFE STRUCTURE KEEP OUT!
—but they had left the old front door in place, chained and padlocked shut.
A boy called Luke Drayton in the year above me at school had tried to use bolt cutters to break in and ended up taking off two of his fingers at the second knuckle.
There had been dried blood on the pavement for weeks afterward.
“Stupid kid,” my father had said at the dinner table that evening. “He could’ve just used a screwdriver and taken that door off at the hinges.”
“Maria, can you hear me? I need you to take a deep breath and listen. When you look at the padlock on the door, do you see the metal clasp it’s attached to?”
“I see it.”
“Do you see the screws on it? The little round things?”
“With the crosses?”
“Yes! Yes, that’s right! You see crosses, like the letter X?”
“I guess so.” She sounds unsure, her voice turning watery again.
“Does your brother have a screwdriver in the house? Do you think you can find it?”
I know Maria isn’t going to be able to take the hinges off this door. It’s old, thick wood, probably been here since the farm was built. But a padlock hasp? That should be easy, and if I can get this door open, I’m gone. Doesn’t matter how big these woods are, anywhere is better than this.
I slide the wire into the keyhole, twisting it so that I can apply tension.
How long do we have until Andrew comes back from the chemist?
I start to sweat as I hear Maria running down the hallway to fetch the screwdriver, lights flashing across my vision.
I wonder if I’m going to faint. I put my head against the door, close my eyes.
Maria’s voice seems to come from very far away as she says, “My brother won’t like this, Hazel. When he gets mad, something happens to his eyes. They go like the night. I don’t want to make him mad. I don’t want to see his night-eyes.”
Your brother is the least of your worries, I think, picturing that bathtub boiling over with bloodied, matted hair. The scratching Maria had heard inside it, the way the strands had stuck to her skin. My other sister is already much stronger than I’d realized.