Chapter 27
“Maria.” I say her name as I sit up very slowly, my eyes not leaving the dark, occupied space beneath the bed. “We need to go downstairs. Now.”
I grip her hand in mine as we hurry through the doorway. Behind us, my other sister makes a sound like a clogged plughole draining slowly away. A rich, horrible gurgle from the broken black hole of her mouth.
I push Maria ahead of me as we run down the hallway.
There are pale patches on the walls where picture frames have been removed, nails jutting out of the plaster.
The lights are dimming. I suppose the generator must be running low.
I can hear the wind picking up, rattling the eaves.
Not a howl but a banshee wail, high and hopeless. Foretelling a death.
“What’s happening, Hazel? Where are we going?”
“To the cellar.”
I don’t know this house, I don’t know what stands behind the doorways we’re passing, but I do know that the cellar is a place where I feel safe.
I’m sure there’s something in that—some version of Stockholm syndrome which I can’t quite identify—but I can’t think about it right now, because I think I hear my other sister creeping up behind us.
It sounds like a brush with long horsehair bristles dragged along the floor. I shudder.
“Please, Maria, come on!”
Down the stairs, our footsteps pattering like soft rain. I let my hand trail over the fleur-de-lis, damp beneath my fingers. Our breath melts into the air. Lights flicker.
“Don’t look round. Keep going.”
Maria hesitates at the cellar. I understand her reluctance. It’s dark down there, and the smell coming through the doorway is expelled like foul breath. Her thin fingers grip the doorframe, and I worry that I’m going to have to push her through.
“They’re all dead now,” she tells me quietly. Still she doesn’t move. I grit my teeth. Behind me I can hear the wet, slithering sound of my other sister coming down the stairs.
“Who are?”
“The women.” Maria looks up at me. With her big, luminous eyes and ashen skin, she reminds me of an abyssal creature, one who has spent their life dwelling in the dark. “The ones my brother brought here. They went down there, and they came out screaming.”
I give her a smile that I don’t feel. “You’re safe with me. Come on, quickly now.” I keep smiling as I peel her panicky grip away from the doorframe.
At the last moment, her gaze drifts to something behind me and I see her mouth dropping open into a shocked O of horror. I hear the snickering laugh of my other sister, and then all the lights go out.
I press Maria through the doorway and she stumbles, scuffing her knees and crying out in pain.
I slip through behind her and shove the door closed using my full weight.
I’m expecting resistance from the other side—a rattling of the door handle, a hard pull outward— but there is nothing.
No tap-tap-tap with a spindly finger, no disembodied voice saying, little pig, little pig, let me in.
For now it is just me and Maria, who is quietly sobbing. We descend into the basement.
There are no more cereal bars down here, but there is water, and we share a bottle between us.
The house creaks and groans, and I can faintly hear the thin squeee of metal as the weather vane turns on the roof.
I realize I still have the can of hair spray in my hand, but it doesn’t make me laugh anymore and I slide it into my pocket as I sit on the edge of the mattress, pulling my holdall toward me.
I dig through it, looking for a pair of socks, eventually finding some beneath a clean pair of striped pajamas that my mother had bought me for my stay in Belle Vue.
“What are you doing?” Maria asks, watching as I unroll the socks and pick up the bar of soap I’d thrown at her brother on my first day here.
“Making a stryker.”
“Like the one you made for Danny?”
“Exactly.” I nod. “I’m putting soap in this one, but you can use anything, really. It’s the pivot that makes it effective.”
I demonstrate, dropping my hip and swinging the sock in a large, swooping arc.
Maria’s eyes widen. “Does it hurt?”
“I’ve never actually used one before, but it’s enough to knock someone unconscious if you do it hard enough, I guess.”
I move over to the mattress and settle onto it with my back against the wall.
Maria draws in next to me, her small frame of barely any weight leaning against mine.
The blankets are so cold they feel almost damp, but I pull them over us regardless and let her lay her head on my shoulder.
I run my hand over the bristles growing on her scalp.
She is trembling, a bag of bones covered in thin skin.
When she next speaks, her voice is very thin. “Will it kill us, Hazel?”
I don’t know the answer to that. My other sister has never killed before, but she has hurt plenty. I think the hurting is what she likes best of all. The meanness, the violence. How ugly it makes me, how brutal.
I squeeze Maria closer to me. “I’ll try and look after you, Maria, okay? I’ll keep you safe.”
“Like a mother?”
I nod. A mother. Andrew couldn’t have picked a worse person, I think to myself.
Mothers are shelter and comfort, steadfast and selfless.
It’s Cathy I think of when I think of a mother, not my own.
Cathy, who had once described motherhood as like being the captain of a sinking boat in shark-infested waters.
I used to watch her and Danny with awe, the games they played, the way they would laugh together, his hand reaching for hers with such certainty that she would always be there.
“You know what someone told me recently? That if you’re frightened, you should think of your happiest memory and try to hold on to it. What’s yours, Maria?”
She burrows deeper against me. “The blue rabbit.”
The wind whistles around the edges of the window.
“He was my best toy. He had a ribbon round his neck and a fluffy white tail that I liked to chew. My mum said that in real life, bunnies aren’t blue and so that made my bunny a magic bunny and so that’s what he was called, Magic. I remember—”
A noise on the stairs. She falters.
“Go on,” I whisper.
“I remember a sunny morning. Snowdrops around the bottom of the tree. Magic the rabbit had a shiny balloon tied to his little white tail. The balloon was a heart shape with writing on it that said ‘Birthday Girl.’ There were pancakes.”
“What was on the pancakes?”
“Chocolate sauce in the shape of a number three.” Maria yawns. She is warm against my shoulder.
“Your third birthday. Like in the photo?”
Maria pauses, her face screwed up in concentration. “Yes. Only—”
Another pause. This time we both hear a dragging sound behind one of the stone pillars. I try to keep Maria’s attention fixed on the memory.
“I don’t know how to explain it. They’re different, even though they’re the same memory.
The snowdrop memory is like putting a new strip of cherry Wonderland in your mouth.
Sugary and bright red. The photograph memory it is like after you’ve chewed it a long time and it is gray and clumpy and all the taste has run out. ”
She is growing tired, heavy against my shoulder. I nod. I’ve been waiting for her to say something like this ever since I realized Maria has no scar on her face. There’s nothing there at all.
“What was your memory, Hazel?”
“Let’s see.” I close my eyes and focus on Joe. I try to picture our beautiful house in Wiltshire, where swifts would dive and swoop over the tall heads of foxgloves in summer, but there is something wrong. Something is diluting it, thinning it down until it runs between my fingers like water.
Instead, I have an image of Cathy, painting her toenails and laughing in Central Park as a cigarette burns between her fingers.
I smile to myself. I remember this. Three years before I’d met Joe, I’d flown out to New York to stay with my sister.
We’d got day-drunk, a pleasant buzz that had tilted us decadently toward an evening in Brooklyn.
Danny was with a minder and we had some money in our pockets and Cathy had been telling a funny story about a man she’d dated, and we had laughed so long our stomachs hurt.
I remember the sun, baking freckles onto my skin.
Cathy and that pink nail varnish, her look of fierce concentration as she’d applied it to her toes.
I’d told her she looked like our mother, and she’d told me cheerfully to fuck off and die.
“It’s my sister,” I tell Maria, but when I look down at her, she is already asleep. I tuck the blankets more tightly around us and take another sip of water. I want to stay awake long enough to see Andrew walk through the doorway. I need to be ready. One way or another, I need to end things.
A mother is the hole you spend your life crawling out of.
I lift my head slowly. I don’t want to wake the girl, curled up at my side.
My eyes haven’t quite adjusted to the dark, but I can just make out a pool of shadow in the center of the floor congealing and clotting like old, spilled blood.
Knotted hair and a bulge of pale skin, lumpy with protrusions of bone.
The smell is clogged drains and high, polluted tides.
I check Maria, but her eyes are still closed, her breathing soft.
She wants you to be her mother. How sad. Doesn’t she know what you are, Hazel?
My other sister’s hair is so matted it drags behind her like a thick, heavy cloak. My scar throbs in the small of my back.
“I am a rational woman,” I mutter, turning my face away. “I do not allow my imagination to play games with me.”
Did you know that a sow may savage her own piglets after farrowing? They have to muzzle the new mothers so they don’t eat their young.
I close my eyes and remind myself that I am a rational woman even though it feels like my blood is boiling in my veins.
I know the things you want to do. You want to shatter Maria’s skull with that stryker of yours. Break it open like a soft-boiled egg and dip your fingers into the soft tissue. You could taste the memory of the blue rabbit like an antacid on your tongue.
I look up. Now my other sister is crawling along the ceiling toward me.
Her long, long hair brushes against the floor.
I stiffen, biting my tongue to avoid crying out.
I can’t wake Maria, so I remain very still as long, ticklish strands of hair brush over my skin.
It leaves an oily trail along my lips, the lids of my closed eyes.
It is the twitching antennae of insects, seeking a way in.
I grew beneath your bones, in the gaps between your vertebrae. I wound my hair around your spine. We are two parts of the same monster. Open your mouth. Let me in.