Chapter 41 #5
He’s rambling, lips wet and drooping. I unhook the keys from his belt. A good caretaker, he’s neatly labeled them all—I’m almost amused to see that the key to the basement is labeled CELL—and I pull up the one marked GEN SHED as I head out the door and into the dark, frosty night.
If you can’t keep it under control, Hazel, then you don’t come around here.
I’ve put a lot of people in danger. I haven’t been able to help it, because she is always there inside me, her voice a chasm I so willingly fall into.
Joe had cried, turned away from me, sunlight falling over his freckled back.
I can’t do this anymore, Hazel, he’d said, and I thought he meant he’d fallen out of love with me, but he hadn’t. Her voice was just too loud in my ear.
Outside, the air is so brittle I feel I could put my hand through it, like a thin sheet of ice.
I cross the ground quickly, barely noticing the cold against my bare feet, even when the snow is up to my shins.
When I reach the shed, I’m surprised to find that the door is already standing open and a thin layer of snow has blown inside.
I bend down to inspect the lock. The hasp is now just hanging from a single hinge, the padlock lying a few feet away in a heap of twisted metal.
It looks as if it has been clumsily beaten off, with a rock or a crowbar maybe.
I think back to earlier this evening when I’d been tied to the chair, the sound of the drill building like the whine of a jet engine.
The power had cut out only seconds after, almost as if someone had been outside, listening.
Waiting for the right moment to turn off the generator.
Maria.
I can’t think about it. Acts of kindness are their own kind of cruelty—each one feels like a paper cut.
I don’t deserve it. Easier to tell myself that by then, Maria had been inhabited by my other sister, whispering her insidious instructions into the girl’s ear.
That’s why she broke into the shed and turned off the generator.
Two sides of the same monster. Twins.
I find what I’m looking for on the shelf beside the door. A row of petrol canisters, many of them already empty. The fifth one I pick up has liquid sloshing around inside. It’s about half-full, which’ll do. I don’t think I’ll need much.
I struggle to catch my breath as my head does another of those woozy 360-degree spins.
I can’t wait here too long, however. I swiped the lighter from Cathy’s pocket when I hugged her earlier.
I feel bad about it, but I’m hoping she’ll be a good distance away before she realizes it’s gone.
Right now, my need is greater than hers.
I lurch my way across the snow, stepping in prints I’d made only a few minutes ago. Out here, with no light pollution, you can look up and see the wisps of a galaxy, far overhead. I bet the Bray Farm was beautiful once. Maybe once it’s burned down, they can rebuild. Exorcise all the demons.
I have to take another breather when I’m back in the house, bending over and waiting for the world to stop spinning.
He drilled down to the bone, Cathy had said.
Part of me wonders what it looks like. A glint of my skull under bloodied, torn flesh.
It almost makes me glad there aren’t any mirrors in here.
“They didn’t put the strappers on. The strappers. The things that go across you.”
Andrew is still talking. Does he even realize I’ve been gone?
“Strappers?” I ask him. His good eye finds me, stares. The other is still off-kilter, looking away from the world as if sickened by it.
“You wear them. Safety.”
“Seat belts.”
“They didn’t put the beatselts on.”
That stryker has knocked him witless. He’s still on about his parents.
I almost feel sorry for him as I’m unscrewing the petrol cap.
Andrew looks up at me. His good eye is dark and muddy, blackening underneath.
When he next speaks, his voice is clear and completely normal.
If it wasn’t for that sinkhole in his temple, you’d think there was nothing wrong with him.
“Some houses are just built bad, Hazel. Some houses can’t be repaired no matter how much work you put in, because the foundations are rotten.”
He gives me a ghastly smile as I start to pour the fuel out of the canister in fits and splashes, spreading it around.
The smell of petrol is awful. It always makes me feel sick.
I make sure to get the bottom of the stairs, the banisters.
The door to the cellar. I want to watch that fucker burn.
I pour it over Andrew, not because I want him to suffer but because I want it to be over quickly.
He doesn’t even blink. Just keeps right on looking at me, reaching out as if he has some great wisdom to impart.
“But you can always knock it down and rebuild. That’s the beauty of it. It’ll look a little different, but it will still give you shelter.”
I stare at him. The canister is empty now. I toss it to one side. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I pull the lighter out of my pocket and hold it up. It’s a little plastic disposable, almost empty. On the side, a drawing of a marijuana leaf with the words LET’S GET LIT beneath. I laugh.
“For fuck’s sake, Cathy.”
I flick the wheel, and the spark catches, becomes a flame. Through it, Andrew is shimmering like heat haze. He nods, just briefly. I try to have a good thought, something profound. Something beautiful to go out on. But all I can think of is that stupid lighter, those dumb words.
“Let’s get lit.”
I touch the flame to the darkening pool of petrol soaking into the carpet, and there is a soft whumph! noise like a canvas sail flapping in a wind. I feel a barrage of heat roll toward me. Tall flames skitter like nervous laughter. They circle me, sealing me in.
I see her then, rising like a vine out of the ground.
My other sister, a shrieking mass of bulging skin and hair that is already beginning to catch and smolder.
I can smell it cooking, that pungent, acrid odor as each fine strand crackles and shrivels to nothing.
Taller and taller she gets, skimming the ceiling and swaying like one of the lofty Idless pines as the flames lick hungrily at her.
There is a sharp cracking sound as something inside her pops like kindling.
A bone, maybe. Some loose knuckle, cracking under her skin.
She is shimmering through the flames in front of me like a walking inferno.
I think of her memory of the surgeon, opening her up. The voice saying, Does it feel pain?
I hope not. I hope she feels nothing as the ends of her hair blacken and shrivel like thin, twisted wires.
I hope not as her golden eyes bulge and shimmer, bubbling from their sockets.
My hands are still wet with fuel, and the flames can’t reach me, shielded as I am by her.
My other sister’s mouth hangs open. It is a vast, dark cavern.
A doorway. Through it, there will be blackness and warmth, a safe, wet haven.
I close my eyes.
I step toward her.