Chapter I. 2007 #2
“That’s not true,” Brittany Johnson said.
Tricia frowned. “Is so. She said their hair was braided together. One of them looking forward and the other backward. And that they didn’t have eyes really.
It was just all white. And then they made this sound.
” She closed her eyes and opened her mouth as the girls went silent.
Waiting. Listening. Until a small whine crept from Tricia’s lips, her eyes fluttering slightly open as it pitched lower into a throaty rattle.
“I can’t do it as good as she can. Makes my throat hurt.
Anyway, she ran before they could grab her and eat her.
Because that’s what they do if they catch you.
Pull their mouths apart with their hands until their jaws break and then slurp you up whole. ”
Camilla had been the first to fall asleep. It was her first sleepover. She was an only child. No one had ever told her not to be the first one to fall asleep.
She woke to a pressure on her abdomen. A faint tickle over her face that smelled of synthetic strawberries.
The dark bloomed around her, stretched out and out until she wondered if she’d tumbled into the sky, but there was no air in it.
She gasped and pushed against the thing on her abdomen.
It did not move, and beneath its weight, her body went cold with panic.
And that sound. A slow rattle. So much like the impossible beginning of a death.
Air as it fled the failing lungs for some other, unknowable vessel.
Across her face, she felt that same delicate tickle as the sleep-hidden world around her came into sharper focus.
A pale form crouched on top of her, its face bending to study hers, its hair falling over Camilla’s face as it opened its mouth wider, the hands creeping up its face so it could break its teeth and jaw before swallowing her.
She screamed. Clawed at the shape that still pressed against her until she felt the soft tear of flesh.
The quick warmth of blood under her fingernails.
Again and again, she lashed out, until the shape squealed and tumbled away.
Her chest freed of its weight, Camilla pulled breath into her in great heaves.
The air that rushed back into her lungs was sharp, and she panted as light flooded the room.
Tricia Allman lay curled beside Camilla, her hands covering her face.
But they could all see. All the girls. The blood weeping from Tricia’s right eye like some misplaced stigmata.
As if the nail that pierced Christ’s palms had somehow found its way into Tricia Allman’s right eye.
That was how they would all describe it after.
Like a horror show. Even if it was only a scratch.
In their girlish minds, it was a bloodbath.
“She scratched me! She scratched my eye out!” Tricia howled as the other girls crowded around her in confusion. They ignored Camilla, who sat in the quickly cooling urine-damp of her sleeping bag trying to understand what was happening.
At some point, amid the chaos of Tricia screaming and Camilla sobbing, someone hit the intercom button, and Tricia’s parents came rushing in. And that was the end of Tricia Allman’s ninth birthday party.
Camilla’s mother came to pick her up, her mouth pressed in a thin line as Tricia’s mother explained what had happened.
“A silly prank. You know how girls are. Telling scary stories and whatnot. We’re just thankful Tricia wasn’t more hurt. I can’t imagine what could have possibly possessed Camilla to react that way.”
“Maybe your daughter sitting on her chest and scaring her half to death had something to do with it.”
“Ada, please—”
“It’s a shame, really. That Henry and I trusted you with our daughter.
He’ll be so disappointed when he hears about this.
” She took a step forward and then another, forcing Tricia’s mother to stumble backward.
“More of a shame that I wasn’t here when it happened.
Because if I had been here when your daughter decided to play her blasphemous little prank, you’d be dealing with much more than a scratch. ”
Whirling on her heel, she grasped Camilla’s hand and marched her to the car.
The drive home was quiet, but her mother held her hand the entire time.
She carried Camilla inside as if she were four years old again and then ran a bath and helped her inside the warm water.
Passed a washcloth over her face again and again until her tears finally slowed.
“Hush, now.” Her mother hugged Camilla to her, not caring that her daughter was going to ruin her Derek Lam blouse.
“It’s just a story. And little girls exaggerate.
The Dark Sisters have never eaten anyone.
At least not as far as I know.” Her mother winked at her. It didn’t make Camilla feel any better.
Later, Camilla would be embarrassed by what had happened at the sleepover.
How she’d reacted. No one held it against her.
No one made fun of her or reminded her how she’d sliced Tricia’s face open with her fingernails.
But in that moment, as her mother wrapped her in a towel and rubbed at her arms, she felt only fear.
Fear that the Sisters would find her. Wrap their hair around her like a cocoon.
Squeeze her body until it burst like ripe fruit, their mouths stained with the juice of her as they ate her body and drank her blood like some profane Communion.
Back then, the story of the Dark Sisters felt so much bigger. There’d been nothing allegorical in it. It had been visceral. Real. She carried her fear like a second skin, slipping it on and off from year to year until she was old enough to understand.
The Dark Sisters were not a story. They were a lesson.
One Camilla had been learning her entire life.
Be good. Be pure and modest and chaste. Because the temptations of the world wore many faces.
Some of them lovely. Even Satan was beautiful when he fell, after all.
She imagined the Sisters had been the same.
Still, down in the sleeping parts of her she tried to ignore, there was a fear. The Dark Sisters might not have been real, but the illness was. And it had come among them again.
Again, she scanned the crowd and darted a glance at the Whitten pew.
Noah sat beside his father, his gaze on the pulpit but soft with boredom.
She craned her neck further, a pretense at stretching, and found Brianna in her family pew at the back of the church.
Brianna rarely talked about it, but even this simple push to the outer circles of visibility within the church spoke of an otherness Camilla knew she resented.
A bitterness born of her darker skin. Even after four years of membership in The Path, Brianna’s family was often left off invites.
Dinner parties and galas and prayer circles came and went without their names included on the guest list. Their money didn’t matter in the face of such dimly veiled prejudice.
Camilla had brought it up with her father only once, and he’d frowned and told her she was mistaken. He didn’t want to hear about such ridiculousness again. That moment counted among the first cracks in her girlish belief her father could do no wrong.
Brianna caught Camilla’s eye. Who’s sick? she mouthed.
Camilla shrugged. Outside. Later.
Brianna gave a brief nod, her dark eyes going even darker with concern.
Camilla ground her teeth together and caught at a loose bit of skin at her cuticle and tugged, the release a delicious sting. She both hoped and did not hope for blood.
She wanted the blood for what it meant. Cleansing.
Penance. A release of all the sinful thoughts and feelings contained within her treacherous skin.
But to bleed so publicly would invite questions she did not want to answer.
There were no ways to mold the complexity of those thoughts and feelings into anything resembling cogent speech.
She thrust her hand beneath her thigh and looked back at the altar.
The last bit of her father’s sermon washed over her, and soon enough, every head in the congregation bowed in prayer for the benediction.
The band took their places—some quiet approximation of Christian pop—and the service was over.
Her mother stood, her willowy body lovely in its divine, silken armor, and drifted to her husband’s side.
From this spot, they would greet the congregation and exchange blessings for the stolen minutes Camilla needed with Brianna and Noah away from prying eyes.
Camilla moved through the throngs of women comparing dresses and jewelry, all chattering about the upcoming Purity Ball or the sermon.
The Dark Sisters and the possibility of more sickness had taken root despite any distractions the Purity Ball offered.
Her father had warned them, and they all felt the edge of it.
Finally, she burst through the vestibule doors and drew the first clean breath she felt she’d taken all morning.
She hurried through the parking lot with its gleaming collection of Maseratis and Mercedes, hoping no one—particularly Grant Pemberton—was watching as the pastor’s only daughter darted past the immaculate landscaping.
Noah and Brianna were already there, a wall of unmanageable kudzu at their backs. Brianna’s face was screwed into a frown, the burgundy lipstick she wore immaculate somehow despite the contortion, as she whispered furiously at a rather amused-looking Noah.