Chapter 32
It’ll all be over soon.
I look up at the sound of her voice. It’s deeper and more sonorous than it has been the last few days.
It has developed a resonance. Solidity. Outside, the snow has stopped but the wind is shrill and hostile, battering the sides of the house.
I can hear the tortured shriek of the weather vane, turning restlessly.
They’ll find you in the spring thaw. Your bones will have grown a layer of moss.
White fingers curl around one of the pillars. Next, a head peers round, only it’s not a head, not really. It’s a bulge of mottled flesh, two sunken pits in which yellow eyes float like scum on water. Her skin has a flush of lividity, of cold, still blood.
“I am a rational w—”
I liked her, the psychologist that taught you that funny refrain.
I followed her home and when she slept, I pulled her hair.
She thought it was her cat at first. After a time, she screamed and made her husband turn on all the lights, but I had made myself small, watching through the gap in the curtains.
She was hysterical. “I saw something!” She clawed at her face and I had to smother my laughter.
She didn’t return to Belle Vue for three weeks.
She’d grown afraid of you. She was not a rational woman.
I stare out the window. My other sister is right about the psychologist. I saw her for six sessions, when I first arrived at Belle Vue.
After that, I didn’t see her again. She’d been replaced by a skinny man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a gulpy, nervous way of talking.
He hadn’t thought me a rational woman. He’d upped my dose of Leprazine and told me I might benefit from electroconvulsive therapy.
The sow savages her young in a state of high excitement, almost a frenzy. Often, the piglet will be consumed alive. It doesn’t matter to the mother. She doesn’t always know best.
The mattress tilts slightly, as if a weight has settled at the end of it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the shape of her looming, dark and hunched with her long, long hair trailing across the floor.
I stare out at the snow. It should be beautiful, but it terrifies me.
It is entombing us here like mosquitoes in amber.
It makes me think of Joseph Bray with his wife’s head on his lap.
Sows with their snouts caked in gore. Diana, scratching her name into the glass.
You’ll end up killing that girl. If you do it now, at least it will be quick. A shove on the stairs and her skull will burst open like a split melon.
I’ve been wondering what Maria will think when she sees herself properly for the first time.
Of course, she will have glimpsed her reflection before; warped in chrome taps or the backs of spoons.
Perhaps she has seen herself reflected in her bathwater, indistinct and wavering, a nymph.
She will have felt the contours of her face; the smooth, angular planes of her cheeks, the hollows of her eye sockets, ridged, thick brows.
She will know herself. She will not know herself.
But isn’t that true of all teenage girls?
These mushrooms would do it. You don’t need many. A handful. Little brown deaths.
I close my eyes. The mushrooms are growing everywhere now.
They have turned soft and black, little death arrows pointing skyward, emerging through the cracks in the walls, along the sill.
I don’t know what they are. They do not look like anything I have seen before, yet I know they would burn Maria’s insides like glowing embers.
She might not want to eat them, but there are ways of forcing them down. Oh, she would see such pretty things.
This is how it starts. Metal shavings buried in mashed potatoes, a lit match pressed to a crumpled newspaper, scissors in my hands.
My other sister’s words are an invocation, sliding painlessly between the creases of my brain, where they lodge in the gray matter, glittering and lethal, like ground glass.
“Why her? Why not Andrew?”
But I already know why. It’s because Maria matters to me.
The patron saint kept in a glass coffin, the little girl who never grew up.
Part of me thinks that if I can save her, I can save myself—although if I were to really think about it, that’s the sort of hyperbolic bollocks that would make Cathy roll her eyes and say, Get down off the cross, honey, somebody needs the wood!
Even so, the truth is buried in there somewhere, like light shining through cracks in a rock. If I can save her, maybe I can be free.
Something cold drapes over the back of my neck. A wet scarf of hair, like an appendage. I think of that mottling, so like livor mortis. She draws in close enough that I can smell her rotting-seaweed odor, the raw, lipless slot of her mouth moving close to my ear.
There’s a path. Up by the graves on the right.
That’s why he made you wear that pillowcase, so you wouldn’t see it.
It won’t take you straight to town, but it will take you to the old back road that winds up past the ridge.
You could make it before dark if you leave now.
From there you can get a phone signal. By midnight you could be home, soaking in a hot bath.
A glass of wine, some fruity red, aged and mellow, and all this would be left behind, like fingerprints on glass. One day you would forget completely.
I allow myself the luxury of thinking about that, just for a second.
A clean bath, hot water. A plate of steaming pasta, glossy with oil.
My stomach rumbles. But the divorce papers would still be waiting for me, and my life would still be packed into boxes in the garage, and nothing will have changed.
I can take care of him for you. I’ll put my mouth over his in the dark. His feet will beat a tattoo onto the mattress.
She leans against me, heavier than I remember. The feel of her is like the slimy clog of gelid hair you pull out of a drain.
All I ask is that you give the girl to me, Hazel.
“No.”
She coils tighter around my neck. Cold and sinuous. Muscular. Dirty hair tickles my cheek.
I’ve been all around this house. I’ve been into the eaves where many years ago a man once swallowed so many hat pins that they perforated the walls of his stomach and stuck out of him like quills. He died up there and left a black stain on the floorboards that can’t be scrubbed away.
I try to shift away from her, but she holds me close, her strength filling me with dismay.
I’ve seen the barn where Joseph Bray took an axe to his children and stained the winter snow red. In the floorboards of the kitchen one of his wife’s teeth is embedded still, like a pearl in the wood.
Her voice is bruised, quiet. Words, slippery as oil.
Squatters broke in once, but only two stayed. The others said they felt a bad presence here, and they were right. The woman left behind had her head caved in. A soft light had oozed out the rupture, like something inside her was escaping.
The feel of her against me fills me with revulsion. Cold, wet. Like handfuls of dead autumn leaves. Like mulch.
This is a bad place, Hazel. It puts devils inside the heads of men.
My own brain feels soft and atrophied. Maybe it’s whatever was in that needle, lingering like a hangover, but not entirely.
Some of it, I suspect, is the effect of my other sister and her gurgled, slithering words.
My therapist—the woman, not the twitchy, nervous man who thought I should be shocked back into sanity—had asked me, “What happens when you try ignoring her?” and so I’d told her about the hives.
How the smell of them burning was beautiful: scorched honey, rich, molten wax.
The light of the late afternoon, the low, somnambulant drone of the dying bees, trailing curls of smoke as they rose into the air like scraps of smoldering paper.
She’d nodded silently, the therapist, and written something in the notepad she kept balanced on her lap.
“Your other sister didn’t like your husband, then?
” No, I told her. She doesn’t like anyone except me.
The therapist had tilted her head enough that the sunlight had slid over her glasses, momentarily turning the lenses into molten gold.
“And a part of you likes that, doesn’t it, Hazel?
Being the favorite?” No wonder my other sister had hated my therapist. She was right.
I’ve watched Andrew when he comes back to the house.
He has a locked room upstairs which is all his own.
There isn’t much in it. A chair. A covered table.
Tarpaulin on the floor to catch all the blood.
He likes to walk around this room. He likes to remember.
You can smell death in there. It covers everything, like spores.
Rich and sweet, spoiled pork. Like farrowing, murderous sows.
“Stop it.”
I’ll save you, Hazel. Just give me the girl.
I don’t answer. I’m thinking. Maybe I will give her Maria.
After all, I’m not a brave woman. I once sold my sister out by telling my parents that she’d stuck her finger up at Mr. Jenner because I was frightened I’d end up getting into trouble.
Besides, she might be telling the truth about the path.
I could make it home by tomorrow. Cold and hungry.
But alive. My other sister is vibrating with expectation.
She senses my indecision. It feeds her, I think.