Chapter 39
I dream of the Wiltshire fields, the hives burning beneath a giant Aztec sun.
Bees inscribe the language of smoke against the sky, rising like ashes in the air.
All around me the smell of scorched honey and wax, soft and caramel and slightly acrid.
My other sister is watching with her gelid, luminous eyes.
Deep-sea creature’s eyes. She opens her mouth and says,
See you on the other side, Hazel-Mazel.
And when I turn to look at her, it is not my other sister at all, it is Abigail, and she is crying. She is saying, I couldn’t get out. I was on fire and I couldn’t open the door!
Abigail leans closer, her face blackened with soot, her eyes haunted and dreadful, the way she’d looked when she fell out into the sunlight with her clothes and braids smoking. All I can smell is burning, burning.
Someone was watching, Hazel. They know what you did.
I swim to consciousness through what feels like layers of warm, polluted water. My eyes are sticky, hard to open. I am sat upright, unable to move. My chin is resting on my chest. I am drooling like a sick animal. I remain very still, waiting for the nausea to pass.
“Don’t try to stand up. I gave you a hell of a dose.”
Footsteps. Andrew whistling that annoying, atonal little tune. The floor is shiny and black and slightly wrinkled in places. I stare dumbly, wondering if I’ve somehow dragged remnants of my dream through with me. A cloth is passed clumsily beneath my mouth.
“I got halfway to the Spit before I realized what you’d done. I heard your phone beeping, but by the time I pulled it out my bag, it was dead.”
I don’t respond. I’m not sure I could if I tried. I shift my foot, and the floor rustles with a sound like newspaper. It’s bothering me, that floor. Not wood, not carpet. Rubbery and black, like latex. I frown.
“I was mad, but then I thought it was a pretty neat trick. Clever, you know? What with that and the invisible ink, you’ve certainly tried your hardest to get out of here.”
I run my foot along the floor again. Shiny. I feel a faint prick of anxiety. Andrew swipes the drool from my mouth again, lifting my head up as he does so.
“But the neatest trick of all was how you talked my sister into doing your dirty work for you. Because the note, the phone—there’s no way you could have done any of it alone.”
He has a locked room upstairs which is all his own.
“But I’ll deal with my sister later. Right now, I’ve got something special planned for you.”
There isn’t much in it. A chair.
I squint down at my arms. I am in a chair of dark wood with a high back, the slats pressing against my spine.
I can see long gouges in the surface, as if people have sat here and fought.
My wrists are strapped down to the curved arms. More of that rubber tubing, dark red.
I curl and uncurl my fingers. The straps are very tight.
A covered table.
With a great effort, I lift my head and there it is, in the far corner. A small square table in this otherwise unfurnished small square room. A linen cloth has been draped over it, on top of which are some objects I can’t quite see.
Tarpaulin on the floor to catch all the blood.
I start to struggle then, twisting my body around in an effort to get free. At first I am simply thrashing in my seat, and then it begins to tip over, almost in slow motion, sending me crashing to the ground. I bite my tongue so hard I taste iron, stars glittering across my vision.
Andrew sighs, crouching down beside me. He holds something out, and I automatically flinch away before realizing I am looking at a distorted image of my own face.
It’s the clamshell mirror. There is a crack running through it, a single, jagged line which splits my pale, thin face in half.
I stare in wonder and dismay at the shadows pooled beneath my eyes, the curved dome of my shaved skull. My lips are smeared with blood.
“You know what trepanation is, Hazel?”
His voice is a buzz saw but the word is familiar. Trepanation. It tastes old, ancient even. Torture. Cold stones stained with spilled blood. Andrew doesn’t wait for an answer. He snaps the clamshell closed.
“It’s an ancient practice. In fact, it’s the oldest surgical procedure known to humanity. In medicine, they thought it relieved pressure and stagnant blood, got the thoughts flowing. Others used it as a tool to purge evil spirits.”
Andrew walks across to the table and picks up a pair of latex gloves, the kind you see in hospitals. He begins to ease his fingers into them, glancing over at me.
“‘To oust the scourge of thinking-demons.’ Those were the words written on the notes of a Swedish patient in the sixteenth century. He survived the procedure, but many didn’t. Not back then. There were infections. Madness. Blood loss.”
He snaps the second glove on and lifts up a small swab. As he approaches, I find my voice, the words thick and heavy as tar.
“Andrew, I … I don’t have demons.”
“You do, Hazel. You do.”
Something cold and wet glides over my frontal bone, and I smell the distinct fragrance of antiseptic—bright and lemony and intensely clinical. I try to pull away but he puts his hand on the back of my neck. It’s intimate, skin-crawling.
“Your ‘other sister,’ you called her. They cut her out of you. You even showed me the scar, do you remember?”
I shake my head. I’m struggling to think clearly, can’t shake off the effects of that knockout drug he’d given me. I just know I have to escape. His eyes are flat and unfocused, pinprick pupils floating on dull golden coins.
“She was a figment. I had therapy. I’m all better now.”
Tcoh! Andrew clucks his tongue and gives me a disparaging look.
“You think I didn’t read your patient notes?
Haven’t heard you talking to yourself down there in the basement?
” He leans closer, grinning, giving me a good view of that tooth gap.
“You even had me fooled. I swear I could smell her sometimes, you know? Like the drains by the beach on a hot summer’s day. ”
Andrew slides his hand into his pocket and pulls out a pen. It’s a thick marker, the type you’d see in a classroom. He draws a direct line with his finger from between my eyebrows to the dome of my skull and uses his teeth to snap the lid off the pen.
I feel the feather-touch of the nib in a shape I imagine to be a small cross. X marks the spot, I think grimly.
“Your stories fascinated me, Hazel. I started to dream about the surgeons cutting you open. In my dreams, you were full of light.” He runs his gloved hand over my scalp.
The feel of it is repulsive, somehow both wet and powdery and smooth as eel skin.
“It poured out of you like all the days of Christmas.”
“Andrew, please. Your sister is in trouble. She’s outside in the snow. Let me go and help her.”
“Now, I think you and I both know she isn’t my sister, Hazel. Let’s not pretend.” He is wandering back over to the covered table again. “The others never realized, but you did. You knew the instant you saw her.”
“Who is she?”
He lifts something up, and I think it is the clippers, but then I see the long extension cord running from it. It reminds me of a tattoo machine, cylindrical and shaped to fit a hand. Andrew uses another swab to wipe the end of it. There is a glimmer of metal.
My skin contracts, turns cold with gooseflesh. Horror is not the red of spilled blood or the black of midnight, but the filmy, filthy gray of dirty dishwater. Fog, rising. The strained light through thick cloud. The gray of brain matter, seeping sluggish through a gored hole in the cranium.
“Maria was living here. Her mother was a drunk and a drug addict. She’d broken in, her and her waster friends.
They were squatters, nine of them. Off-grid hippies, looking for an alternative way of living.
By the time I found them, it was just Maria and her mother left.
Kelly, her name was. She told me that the others hadn’t liked the place.
It scared them. They felt ‘bad vibes’ here, Kelly said.
Well. They were right about that. There’s something about this house that doesn’t play well with men’s minds. ”
He lifts the machine to the light, inspecting it, and there’s that hard shimmer of metal again. There is a fine steel needle fitted to the end of it, at least four inches long. I am beginning to sweat.
“I did that little girl a favor. I saved her.”
Andrew presses a switch, and there is a shrill whirring sound as the machine buzzes in his hands. It builds in pitch like an engine overheating. The lights flicker briefly overhead.
He smiles. “Back then I was younger, I didn’t know what I was doing.
I was using a pedal-powered hand drill, if you can believe that.
The point of the drill was so blunt that when the blood started flowing, I couldn’t get the teeth to grip the bone.
It took me two hours to get through Kelly’s skull to the dura mater beneath.
But don’t worry, Hazel. I’ve learned a lot since then. ”
He adjusts something, then flicks the switch again. Now the whirring sounds quieter and smoother, like a dentist’s drill. Andrew nods in satisfaction and even smiles a little.
I clutch the arms of the chair, desperately trying to think of a way out of this. Alarm rears like a horse kicking me in the chest.
“You didn’t save Maria. You cursed her. She’s miserable out here, no one to talk to, no friends. Even plants need daylight, Andrew.”
He walks toward me, carrying something that looks like a bonnet, only made of plastic. A shower cap maybe, with a small hole cut in the center of the fabric.
“Hold still. I have to line up the hole.”
“Did you think she’d want to stay here with you forever? The monster who killed her mother? She knows what you are.”
He grabs my jaw hard, keeping my head steady as he positions the cap over my skull. There are two long plastic strips on either side of it, and he ties them beneath my chin. It has the added effect of holding my jaw closed, so he knots it good and tight, grunting slightly as he does so.
“You want me to tell you about my sister, Hazel? She was beautiful. An angel. Three years old and cute as a button, head-to-toe. She was a surprise baby, my parents already in their early forties. I was meant to be their one and done, but then Maria came along and everybody just about fell in love.”
He drapes an old, stiff towel around my shoulders. That’ll be to catch all the blood, I think. Panic swells in my throat.
“I used to give her piggyback rides round the garden. I was teaching her how to swim in the river. When she first learned to talk, she called me Han-drew, which made me laugh and laugh. It wasn’t her fault that my dad drove tired and still a little drunk from the night before.
It wasn’t her fault the roads were icy and he was going too fast. When I heard she’d got out, I figured she was still alive. She had to be, right?”
His face is hard set and unreadable, like an alabaster statue.
He picks up the drill and I experience a moment of vertigo, a sheer wall of terror rising in front of me like a monstrous wave as he walks back toward me.
Close up, that drill is sleek and modern and absolutely terrifying.
I can’t stop thinking of how it will sound going into bone. Grinding and splintering, bubbling.
“When I found her five days later, she looked like she was just sleeping. There was no blood. No gruesome injuries. She was just curled up under one of the big pines not far from here, like a fawn. I knew then that it was a sacred place.”
I can’t speak but I make a sound at the back of my throat. A strangled groan. I know where he means. After all, he’d taken me there himself, showed me the graves.
“She’d managed to walk nearly thirty miles, give or take. I don’t know how she did it, how long it took her. It broke my heart to think of her all the way out here at night, how frightened she must have been.”
He’s lifting the drill to my head, to the place beneath the hole in the cap where he has marked a cross on my shaved skin.
“I buried her there. She’s in the earth now, with the worms and the roots. Safe. Warm.”
He presses the metal tip to my head. I can feel it cold against my skin, the little indentation it makes there as he holds it steady. I can see his finger wrapping around the trigger and realize I am holding on to my breath, burning my lungs like a naked flame.
“When I came across the house and found that little girl here, something inside me just—it was like a light went on. Because now I could tell myself that Maria was alive after all. She survived. It felt like a miracle. Only, you and I both know that miracles don’t exist, don’t we, Hazel?
Not out here, deep in the woods. Here, there is only the wild. Teeth and claws and carrion.”
I close my eyes, waiting for the crack of bone.
I can hear Andrew’s soft, regular breath.
I think of my other sister, standing in the snow with her mouth yawning open.
I think of Cathy laughing in Central Park with a cigarette jutting out of her mouth.
As the whirring begins, there is a sensation like a flashbulb popping in my head, and all the lights wink out.