Chapter 32 #2
A rattle at the top of the stairs, the clunk of the locks being drawn.
I straighten up but don’t stand. Andrew is whistling as he comes down the stairs.
He sounds cheerful, upbeat even. The last time I’d seen him, his lips had been peeled back from his teeth in anger, eyes narrowed to dark slits.
There had been a red stripe of inflamed skin like a bandit mask where I’d sprayed him in the eyes.
Now as he appears in the doorway of the basement room, I can see the skin is still raw and angry looking, like blistering sunburn.
But at least he is smiling, although I don’t trust it, not a bit.
“I’m going to need you to come on over here.” He is carrying a chair in one hand—a plain wooden dining chair, nondescript—which he places on the floor in the center of the room. He points to it. “Take a seat, Hazel.” As he speaks, he pauses to sniff the air.
Although my other sister is no longer visible, traces of her linger: a long black hair coiled around my finger tightly enough to turn it white, the smell of drains and decay.
He senses her, I know he does. Cathy was the same when we were kids.
She used to say that walking into my bedroom always felt as if she was interrupting a conversation.
“I’ll do anything you want as long as you tell me what you’ve done with Scout.”
He grins, giving me a flash of that gap in his teeth. His eyes are still watery, painful looking. Good, I think.
“You’re in no position to bargain with me.” He lifts his other hand. There is something in it, a compact machine, small and slim.
At first glance it looks like a Taser, and I turn horribly cold all over. Then I realise that it is only a pair of clippers, the sort you use on hair.
He sees me notice, and that grin widens. “That’s right. It’s time. I’m told that shaved heads are quite de rigueur these days, so think of it as a fashion statement.”
I still don’t move. “Why do you need to shave my head?”
“For the ritual. Come.”
My stomach rumbles noisily, loud enough for him to hear.
If he does, he doesn’t comment on it. He must know how hungry I am.
It’s deliberate after all. Keep me weak, incapable.
I’m thinking about food all the time now, even when I’m asleep.
Dreaming of it: soft ice cream and strawberries scattered with gritty white sugar, hot buttered toast and hard, salted peanuts roasted in their skins.
I’ve even started craving meat for the first time in years, slabs of it seared and roasted and wet against my teeth. My mouth fills with watery saliva.
“I can stand but I don’t know that I can walk. I haven’t eaten in days.”
“Of course you can walk, Hazel. You’ve been up and down these stairs like a house cat, talking to my sister.
Whispering to her through the door. You think I don’t know these things?
I found the gum wrappers. I know when she’s been up to something.
So stand up or I’ll drag you up and I won’t be gentle about it. Or do I need to get the needle again?”
I shake my head, getting carefully to my feet and making my way over to the chair with wobbling steps. I don’t want to be injected with that stuff again. I can still taste it coating the back of my throat.
“Here.” He guides me into the seat so I am facing toward the mattress and the long window beyond. The snow pressed against the glass is the palest blue, lit from behind by the lowering sun. It must be late afternoon.
“Stay still. I’m quick. I’ve had a lot of practice.”
I hear the electric buzz of the clippers as he pulls up a handful of my hair and presses the blades against my scalp. The vibrations rattle my skull like stones in a tin can. I close my eyes as he begins talking and my hair falls past my shoulders in dark drifts.
“My sister thinks there is a monster down here. She said it speaks with a voice that sounds like yours. I thought she was lying, until I saw her hand.”
Bzzzz! Right beside my ear. I can feel loose hair tickling the underside of my jaw.
“Her poor skin looked like corned beef. Like she’d put her hand into a woodchipper. It frightened me, Hazel. Do you know why?”
The buzzing stops. He leans closer. His hot breath tickles my skin.
“Because if Maria is lying, that means she hurt her hand deliberately. How, I don’t know. Maybe she crushed it with a brick or slammed a door on it over and over while her bones broke.”
“Or?” I whisper.
“Or she’s telling the truth and there is a monster down here.”
He starts the clippers again, using his hand to tilt my head to the side. I can feel it skimming the tops of my ears. There is a cold spot at the back, where the air hits my bare scalp.
“Do you see a monster, Andrew?”
I open my eyes and look at him. His features are dark, and very sunken. Skin like old linen stretched over his bones.
“I see you, Hazel. I see a woman who was abandoned at a private hospital by her husband because she was listening to a voice that wanted him dead. Not just listening either. Acting on it. I see a woman who frightened the Belle Vue nurses so much that they would only enter her room in pairs.”
My mouth drops open in surprise. “Is that true?”
“Word got round about you, Hazel. It isn’t meant to—Belle Vue bills itself as a discreet, private hospital—but it does. Hold still.”
Bzzzz! Louder now, running over my cranium from front to back. My head feels hollow, like a glass bauble.
“The cleaners were talking about it at first. They started finding mounds of long, greasy hair under your pillows, all tangled up like wire wool. At first they thought you were pulling it out yourself. The nurses wrote it on your records. Trichotillomania, it’s called.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I saw your files. It’s an expensive place, but the security is sloppy. Besides, a handyman can go anywhere. Half the time they don’t notice me.”
Andrew grabs my head to hold me still.
“It wasn’t just that the hair looked disgusting. It moved too, as if something was nesting inside it. After that, when they found these clumps it was categorized as hazardous waste. For a time, no one wanted to clean your room. They talked about getting hazmat suits.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I? What about the mushrooms that started growing under your mattress? Thick and black and spongy, big as dinner plates. No one had ever seen anything like it. It had to be incinerated after you left. Were the patients who complained about the noises coming from your room in the night being ridiculous too? They said it sounded like pigs chewing through the walls.”
The sow savages her young in a state of high excitement, almost a frenzy, I think. My shorn scalp crawls with goose bumps.
“One nurse claimed you put a hand on her shoulder and when she turned around, you were all the way over the other side of the room. They were afraid of you, Hazel. Afraid of what you’d brought into the hospital with you.”
“I don’t remember,” I murmur truthfully. Those first weeks at Belle Vue were a blur. Some nights I’d wake up in my small, bare room there, still able to smell the honey burning in the hives. Sweet, smoky.
“I first met you when I came in to change a broken light bulb. I think it was the second week. Two weeks you’d been there, and I’d had to change out the bulbs in that room seven times.
It’s like you was burning the filaments out as quick as I could put ’em in.
When I was coming down off the stepladder, I saw a shadow run across the wall that shouldn’t have been there.
I asked you if you saw it. Do you remember what you said? ”
“No.”
The last of my hair is falling away. I fight the urge to touch my head, to run my hand over the lumps and protrusions of bone under the skin. My scar throbs. I am so tired. I am so hungry.
“You said, ‘It’s my other sister running from the light.’ Now, Hazel, you laughed when you said it, but I didn’t laugh. I asked why your other sister would do a thing like that. You said she preferred to grow in the dark, like mushrooms.”
The clippers click off. Andrew swats at the feathers of hair on my shoulders, brushing them away from the nape of my neck. A cold breeze skims the top of my scalp as a blurred memory surfaces.
“Oh, I do remember. We talked, didn’t we? About mushrooms. I told you about—”
“Devil’s fingers.” He nods. “You told me they were your white whale. I had to look up what that meant after. You even showed me your book, how you’d put notes in all the margins.
It made it easy to write the words right where I needed you to see ’em.
I just had to copy your handwriting. It isn’t hard.
I used to have a real talent for it as a kid, if you can believe that. ”
I stare at him in disbelief. Bray Farm, it had said, tucked into the corner beside the illustration of devil’s fingers. I thought it was my writing. It had looked like mine.
Andrew dusts the last of my hair away from my shoulders, still talking.
“This is the problem with women like you, Hazel. You don’t question nothing.
If you’d have really asked yourself, you’d have known you didn’t write those words.
I watched you turning the pages of that book in the common room, your fingers moving over the pictures.
I used to think you looked normal, and then I remembered that you’ve got something in your brain that shouldn’t be there.
A spirit. A demon. A hundred years ago, somewhere like Belle Vue would have given you proper treatment.
These days, it’s all medication and talking therapies.
I’d like to tell ’em the problem isn’t with your mouth, it’s what’s living in your head!
” He gives a short, mean little laugh. “Got to treat it like an infection. Got to cut it open to let the poison out.”
“Talking of poison,” I tell him, sitting up a little straighter in my chair, “your sister needs a hospital. She’s going to lose that hand if you don’t see to it. Sepsis, gangrene. All sorts of horrible things could happen.”
“I’d rather cut it off myself than take her to one of those death mills,” Andrew sneers, inspecting a clutch of mushrooms that have started growing out of the wooden rafters that cross the room.
They weren’t there this morning, I’m pretty sure.
It’s my other sister. She’s growing. I don’t have long left.
“It may come to that. I mean it, Andrew. She needs antiseptic wipes. Bandages. At the very least, you need to splint her fingers so they heal right.”
“You going to make me another one of your lists?” He laughs nastily, but I can see he’s considering the consequences of leaving Maria to suffer.
“She’s in pain. She’s suffering. You want to help her, don’t you, Andrew?”
He scratches at his jaw. “You can do all that, can you? The splints and whatever?”
I shrug. No point being too cocky. “I’ll try.”
Andrew comes close. His breath brushes the top of my head like a stroking hand.
The smell of him is bitter, like burned-out electrics.
It makes me think of blackened circuit boards and frayed wires, overheated engines.
I wonder if that’s what Diana smelled, at the end.
Gulping mouthfuls of his scorched breath like a furnace on her skin.
He has a locked room upstairs which is all his own, my other sister had said, and oh God, I don’t think it will be long until I’m inside that room. This plan has to work. It has to.