Chapter 30 #2
I take this in, listening to the sleet ticking off the window below, the thin winter voice of the wind. The other one.
“No, Maria. It’s just me.”
“She sounds like you, only her voice is…” Maria tails off, thinking. “Wet. Like as if you got your throat cut.”
Of course she does, I think. She sounds like me because she’s part of me, Maria.
She’s what you’d call a twin, except she never fully formed and when they cut her away, they left something behind, and it grew and grew until it became teratoid, a great and monstrous thing.
The evil isn’t in the woods, Maria. It lives in the minds of men like your brother, like Joseph Bray. It lives just under the skin.
“I couldn’t see very well at first. It was dark, and the moon was in hiding.
But I could hear her, saying my name with a voice that was like yours but not like yours at the same time.
I looked around, and there she was, looking round the pillar.
Her hair was all black and her face was saggy, like a stretched bag of skin. ”
I glance behind me into the gloomy, stygian stairwell. My tongue sticks to the roof of my dry mouth.
“She was saying she had something special to show me. I heard a baby crying and that’s how I knew it must be a dream, because what’s a baby doing out here in the middle of the woods?
The way I figured it was, if I was in a dream, then I was safe.
So I didn’t scream, even when she came right up close to me and her eyes ran out of her head like melting candles. ”
“Maria—”
“‘Would you like to see a cool trick?’ she asked me. Her mouth opened, and right there at the back, do you know what I saw?”
My voice, rattling with fear. Guilt. “What did you see?”
“Magic. My little blue rabbit. He had a bow tied around his neck of pink ribbon, just like he had on my third birthday, the morning of the pancakes. I don’t know how he could fit in there without choking her, but he did.
He did. He was right at the back, and she told me to go ahead and get him. To put my hand in.”
I close my eyes. There are red pulses behind my eyelids, a sour taste in my mouth. I know what’s coming, but it’s so hard to hear, because it’s my fault, isn’t it? I brought her here.
Maria’s small, wavering voice continues.
“I only hesitated when I heard you saying, ‘Please don’t hurt him.’ Do you remember?
I do. You told my brother he would go to prison if he killed Scout, and that’s when I remembered the baby crying and then that got me thinking about the photograph of your sister with her two boys, and I matched them both together like a pair of cards. ”
“That’s very clever,” I tell her, meaning it.
I can remember how I’d heard her start screaming from my hiding place in the wardrobe, Scout warm and snuffling against my shoulder.
It had sounded like an old air raid siren, rising in pitch.
I’d burst through the wardrobe at the same time as Andrew had dashed past the doorway, his eyes wide and white in the dark.
He hadn’t even looked at us. He was calling Maria’s name, taking the stairs two at a time.
“I knew it was going to hurt,” Maria says now. Her voice is growing husky. “But I didn’t think about it too much, not right then. I just closed my eyes and put my hand into her mouth.”
“You did it deliberately?” I can’t quite believe what she’s telling me. I keep seeing the way her hand had looked, the fingers snapped and jutting at strange angles, torn nails ripped from their beds. It had been a scarecrow hand, ghost-white and bloodless.
“Part of me didn’t. Part of me still thought it was just a dream.
Another part really thought I was getting my old toy back.
But mostly I knew she was going to bite, and that even though she has no teeth, I knew it was going to hurt like hell.
I heard the sounds of my own bones breaking in her mouth, and the pain was hot, like putting my hand into a fire and holding it there.
I screamed then. I screamed not just ’cause it hurt but because I knew my brother would come running. ”
I draw a short breath. I’m stunned. I try to think if I would do something like that, something so brave in the face of so much fear.
I don’t think I would. I tell myself it is simply being rational, the wellspring of adult reasoning, but I know that it isn’t.
When I’d burst into the cellar, not far behind Andrew who was already on his knees in front of his little sister, Maria was no longer screaming.
Her mouth had been moving, but by then it was soundless, as if all the air had been sucked out of her.
Her eyes had been circles sketched onto a face the color of milk.
Andrew had kept asking, What happened? What happened?
over and over again as Maria had held her bloodied hand up in front of her, the fingers bent and broken, looking for all the world as if it had been through a mangler.
She had lifted her stricken eyes not to me but to the far corner of the room, where my other sister was already dissipating.
A great carnivorous abyss, falling into shadow.
By then Scout had started to wriggle and exercise his little lungs.
That had been a relief, although I hadn’t felt it then.
I’d barely felt anything outside the circle of cold horror and the creeping, awful certainty that all of this was my fault.
The snow had started falling heavier then, lighting up the cellar with a ghostly lunar light, and Andrew was hugging Maria to him, and her hand was gory and shattered, hanging limp.
So, no, thinking about it, I wouldn’t have done the same. I am a coward. I cannot face the dark.
“When Andrew took me upstairs to find the medicine box, I told him, real quiet. Just whispered it into his ear. I said that if he carried on hurting that little boy, then next time I would climb into her mouth and let her chew me up ’till I was dead.”
“Wow. I bet he didn’t like that.”
She laughs again. The codeine must be kicking in.
“He didn’t quite know what I was talking about, but he knew I meant it because he went quiet for a long time.
I could tell he was thinking really hard because he started grinding his teeth together.
I hate it when he does that. The sound makes me want to pull off my ears.
Then he said, ‘You must really want Hazel to stick around, then, huh?’”
A beat. I sit with my knees drawn up to my chest, clothes still damp from holding Scout so close to me. I’m trembling all over.
“What did—what did you say?”
“I said yes.” Maria’s voice is slightly slurred. Yesh. I think she will sleep soon.
“Why?”
“Because you helped me. You made me remember my blue rabbit so that the monster couldn’t hurt us. You’re the best mother.”
An ache in my chest, like heartburn. I remember holding her thin, bony body beside mine, the soft peach fuzz of her scalp under my chin.
She’s fading in this place, like a light slowly dimming.
I don’t think Andrew will kill her—not like those poor discarded women buried out there in the woods—but he will hold her here until all that light burns out of her eyes.
All her bright, easy intelligence will fade, unnourished.
A slow, rigid life followed by a slow, rigid death, with nothing learned or lost or gained. What a waste.
“Do you trust me, Maria?”
“Uh-huh.” I think that’s in the affirmative. Without seeing her, it’s hard to tell. She sounds like she is fighting to stay awake.
I can picture her outside the door, curled up like a baby bird, head tucked into scrawny shoulders. Hand cradled against her chest, heavily bandaged. Bloodstains on her clothes.
“Good. Because I have something else I have to ask of you—and I know you’re tired and you’re hurting.
I know you probably just want to let your body rest and turn off your brain so you can forget all about what happened here last night, but I think you have to do it today.
I think it might be the only chance we have. ”
Another yawn. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I might have figured out a way we can get out of here. It’s not a great plan, but—”
“We? Both of us?” She sounds surprised.
I twist round so I can press my lips against the gap.
“Yes, both of us. I thought that’s what you wanted.
‘To travel is to live,’ you said. Remember?
You could make friends out there, maybe even take a few classes.
There’s people out there who can help you, Maria, and you’d never have to watch another sunset through boarded windows again. ”
I wait for her response, growing troubled and more than a little frightened as the silence drags.
Early this morning, her brother had stuck me with a hypodermic needle while my back was turned before plucking my wriggling baby nephew right out of my arms. He’s kidnapped and killed at least three women that he’s admitted to, and sometimes when he turns his eyes on me, they are filled with a cold fury which makes me think of shaded, lightless caves.
He’s a monster, and she doesn’t seem to know it.
“But you might like being a mother here, Hazel. You might want to stay. You haven’t even given it a chance.”
Not sulky, not petulant. Those are childish behaviors, and this girl knows nothing of being a child.
She doesn’t know the world outside these four damp walls, has never ridden a bike or climbed a tree or taken a selfie with her friends grinning in the background behind her.
No pictures, no family photographs. All those empty spaces on the walls where glass frames had once hung.
The windows, boarded on the inside. I’d bet my life that there isn’t a single mirror in this whole horrible place.
There’s one, I remind myself, the voice a quiet little jolt in the fog of my head.
“Maria, in my bag upstairs is a compact. It’s plastic and shaped like a clamshell, you’ll know it when you see it.
There’s a mirror inside, it’s only small but it’ll do the job, I think.
I want you to open it up and see yourself.
Look for the scar on your top lip where you had the operation.
Look at the color of your eyes and the roots of your hair.
Really see who you are. If you can do that and still want to stay in this house, then I won’t ask anything else of you.
But if you decide that you do want to get out of here, then I promise, Maria—I promise—that I will help you. I just need you to do one last thing.”
Another silence, shorter this time.
“Hazel?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want to hurt my brother.”
“Neither do I, Maria. What I’m about to suggest isn’t going to hurt him, I promise.”
There’s no hesitation this time. Just her voice, frightened sounding but steady. Curious. “What do you want me to do?”