Chapter 41 #4
She let me in, Hazel.
I stare in horror as the voice of my other sister comes out of Maria’s mouth.
It feels as if the ground is rushing toward me, and I have to put out a hand to steady myself.
I can hear Suzie and Cathy coming down the stairs, Cathy’s voice drifting toward me, talking in that quick, garbled way she does when she’s anxious.
“We found a sweater but it’s going to be way too big, but I guess we can roll the sleeves up. Oh, and there’s a coat, although I think the zip is bust, I suppose we can tie with—”
“Thanks, Cathy.” I turn to her, keeping my composure. Keeping everything as normal as I can. I know what I have to do now. “Help Maria get dressed, will you? Suzie, how long do you think it’ll take to walk to the car?”
She considers this. Her gaze falls on Andrew, and I can see the concern there, writ large all over her face. She was always the most compassionate of all of us.
“An hour, if we don’t stop. Maybe more. It’s not so far when you know the route. As long as the snow hasn’t covered our footprints, we should be okay. You going to be able to walk?”
“I’m going to catch you up.”
I hear Cathy’s intake of breath from just behind me, her hand reaching out to grab my arm. “Absolutely fucking not. We’ve come all this way to find you, we’re not going to just let you make your own way in the dark. Jesus!”
Her face tells me how ridiculous she thinks I’m being. That’s okay. It was never going to be an easy sell, not to Cathy.
I force a smile. “I’ll be five minutes. Less, probably.
I just need to do one thing, but I don’t want to hold us up.
Suzie’s right, we need to get an ambulance out here for Andrew.
Maria needs a warm bed, some food. Probably a doctor.
The sooner we get to town, the sooner we can do this.
Go on. Get going. I’ll be right behind you. ”
It’s a lie, but does she see it? I don’t know. I think Suzie might. Her eyes have narrowed, just a little.
“Are you sure?” my sister asks me, zipping up her coat. They have found Maria a huge parka to put on, it falls almost all the way to her knees. I wonder who it belonged to.
I nod, keep smiling. “Yup. Five minutes.”
Cathy has tears in her eyes again. I don’t know what’s happened to her, she never used to be like this. Then I remember what she has been through, how difficult these last few days must have been. I have to give her some grace. After all, I’m never going to see her again.
She hugs me, pressing so hard all the air is squeezed out of my lungs. “You’re so bony,” she tells me, wiping her eyes. “We’ve got to fatten you up!”
“I look forward to it.”
“Here. I found it upstairs.” Cathy takes out a long silk scarf printed with colorful butterflies. She holds it up and begins to tie it around my head, being gentle with the wound there, wincing in sympathy as she tightens the knot. “There,” she tells me. “Like Rambo.”
“Thanks, Cathy.”
I don’t hug her again. I’m afraid if I do, I won’t let go, and then I won’t be able to do what I need to. It’s hard enough as it is. I watch the three of them leaving, heading out into the dark, heads bent to the wind.
I hear Suzie say, “Five minutes, okay?” as if she is timing me. Maybe she is. It’s long enough, either way.
Maria looks back at me as I stand watching in the doorway a moment longer.
She is knee deep in snow, her mouth open, breath whipped away by the wind.
Overhead, the sky is clear, a vast cathedral arch, spiked with stars.
I wonder if I am doing the right thing. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I got it wrong.
But then she smiles, and I see it there, under the surface. A monster in the skin of a man. Her eyes are limpid spheres full of yellow liquid, and I slam the door before I can see any more. I have to get ready. I have to go out to the generator. That’s where the petrol is.
They march in single file, a small straggling line heading into the deep and haunted woods.
Cathy tries to talk to the girl—Maria, Hazel had called her—but after a few stunted conversations it becomes clear she isn’t going to get anywhere.
Maria walks like a baby deer, all long, ungainly legs, seemingly close to falling over with every step.
“You want to hold on to me, hon?”
Maria looks at her. Her eyes are watering, her nose reddened with cold. Cathy thinks she looks miserable, and she doesn’t blame her. It’s a miserable situation all round, really. Besides, she’d prefer not to have to talk, to be honest—she wants the space to think.
Cathy has been weirded out ever since Hazel told them she wanted to stay behind.
Five minutes, she’d said, but something about it has given Cathy a bad feeling.
Over the last few days, she’s learned better than to ignore those bad feelings, the ones that feel like a bad bout of food poisoning coming on.
The cats, the camera, even Scout and the way he’d felt intangibly different—all these things serve as a reminder to Cathy that sometimes her gut was the compass she’d needed to follow.
“Hey. Cathy, hold on!” Suzie’s voice breaks through her thoughts.
Cathy turns, looking back down the slope to where Suzie is standing with Maria, half-collapsed into the snow. “Oh shit.”
Cathy starts making her way back down toward them, slipping on the compacted surface. Maria is making a hacking noise at the back of her throat. A coughing fit, maybe. She must be unused to the exercise, the fresh air.
“I’ve got you, Maria. Hold on.”
Cathy puts a hand on the girl’s back, feeling the knobs and bumps of her protruding spine even under the layers of clothes.
Poor kid, she thinks as the girl takes in a great whooping inhalation of air.
When she lifts her face toward them, Cathy flinches.
Maria doesn’t look right. Her eyes are flared open, panicked.
Her face is twisted as though she is in pain.
“Maria? What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
But Maria does not reply. Her mouth yawns in a wide, silent scream as her hands scrabble at her throat. Her eyes bulge, swiveling in their sockets. The distress in them is almost too much for Cathy to bear.
“Fuck. She’s choking. What do we do? Suzie, what do we do?”
Suzie moves behind Maria, sliding her hands around so she can lock her fists beneath Maria’s rib cage. She thrusts her fists in and upward, jerking Maria off her feet with the force of the thrust. Then she does it again. And again.
“Has it worked, Cathy? Is she breathing?”
Cathy takes a look at Maria, who is raking her fingernails down her face, dragging white furrows into the skin. Her lips have taken on a dull, bluish hue.
“No. Do it again.”
At that, Maria pulls deliberately away from Suzie’s grip, stumbling forward, hands outstretched. She slides down the trunk of a nearby oak, collapsing among the moss and gnarled roots at the base. Maria’s eyes are streaming as she hooks her fingers into her mouth, prizing it open. She gags.
“What is she do—” Cathy begins, but then the words dry up in her throat.
Maria is pulling something out of her mouth. It looks like black string, Cathy thinks, but then her brain seems to short-circuit, pulling back a memory of being a little girl and lifting her bedcovers to reveal a skein of dirty black hair curled up like a sleeping cat.
Maria retches and coughs, her eyes shiny mirrors pushing out of their sockets. A thin pendulum of drool depends from her lower lip.
It’s hair, Cathy thinks as her stomach gives a queasy somersault. Oh God, I think it’s hair.
Maria’s fingers keep working, digging deeper into her mouth, pulling out more hair in knots and snarls. Every time she gags, a little more comes out. Like cleaning out a drain, Cathy thinks.
Maria begins to gasp and make a thin whistling sound, hitching a breath. Suzie slaps her hard on her back, forcing another cough out of her. She spits, expelling a last clump of filthy wet hair into her cupped palm, about the size of a golf ball.
In the silence that follows, Cathy feels a sluggish dread sinking low in her stomach.
She looks at Suzie, who is standing with her hands over her mouth as if she might be sick.
Cathy thinks again of lifting the bedcover, the wet hair beneath, the smell of it, like drains and rotting fruit.
She thinks of Hazel saying, I just need to do one thing, and she understands. It terrifies her.
“Oh my God.” She looks at Suzie. “I have to go back. I have to go back there right now!”
Cathy once said to me, If you can’t keep it under control, Hazel, then you don’t come around here anymore.
We’d been arguing in her garden, the day I taught Danny how to make the stryker.
Those words had come back to me the morning I’d called Cathy, just over a week ago.
I’d asked her to bring the boys along, and she’d hesitated.
I’d heard that hesitation louder than anything else she has ever shouted at me.
If you can’t keep it under control.
My other sister is never going to go away.
She’ll just mutate, find new ways to apply her old tricks.
It’s already started happening—look how much stronger she became the weaker I got.
She’s a parasite, and now she’s found a way inside Maria.
Pretty soon she’ll consume her. Then it’ll be Cathy, and then she’ll start spreading out like an inkblot, contaminating everything she touches.
Danny, Suzie. My parents. Even little Scout.
But I can stop her.
I find the keys to the shed on Andrew’s key chain, the one which hangs off his belt and jingles when he walks. He looks at me with his one good eye, and I try desperately not to look at the sickening hollow in his temple, the skin across it stretched taut as a drumskin.
“I told him not to drive,” he slurs. “But he just went and bought another bottle.”