Chapter XII. 1953 #3
“I’m not worried,” she told him, and swallowed. Something inside her throat had worked itself free. It tasted gamy. Like something wild that had been hunted and left too long in the sun.
When she lost a molar, she hid it from Robert. Wrapped it in a handkerchief and buried it in the back of the drawer that held her underwear. Somehow, it felt important to keep this from him. Her disintegration.
In the quiet moments throughout the day when the baby slept, she could close her eyes and let herself go still.
In that silence she felt as if there was a warm, hungry mouth buried somewhere in the depths of her chest, worming its way through her tissue, intent only on consumption.
When it was finished with her, she wondered where it would go.
That unending hunger. If it would find another body to inhabit—a carrion devil hunting its next meal—or if it would die with her.
THE NIGHT BEFORE Mary went to the tree, she dreamed of hair in her throat.
She woke gagging and reached into the raw emptiness of her mouth and pulled and pulled.
Long strings of hair dragged over her tongue and teeth.
It clung to her hands, those damp, sticky coils like a second skin she could not peel away no matter how she tried.
She flushed the clump of hair down the toilet and washed the blood from her hands from where her teeth had scratched her skin.
She took the baby, her thought being they could both use the fresh air.
She could not shake the sensation of that hair lodged in her throat, and she wanted out of the house.
Out of that stale air that tasted like dust and her confinement.
She wanted to feel the sun on her skin. To know the possibility of a freedom not granted to her.
And so, with her daughter sleeping in her arms, she left the front door open behind her and walked into the woods.
The sun she’d hoped for was absent. The day overcast, the clouds dark and heavy.
The air held a thickness that spoke of rain, but she did not hurry.
Her muscles ached from lack of use. Her body had gone soft from the limitations of her wifely movements, so she trod slowly, her gaze fixed firmly on the ground.
She didn’t want to trip and fall while holding the baby.
It took longer to get to the tree than she’d expected.
Nothing in Hawthorne Springs was very far apart, but by the time she came through the clearing, she was panting, her shirtwaist damp with sweat.
But she couldn’t stop and rest. Some part of her was compelled to go to the tree.
To stand beneath it, the memory of her skin pressed against its bark alive and burning inside her once more.
As she drew closer, the desire to see it, to touch it, became a primal need.
Her mouth and throat burned, and she gasped against the sudden onslaught of pain.
The sores on her lips burst. She didn’t bother to wipe the blood away as she told herself not to run no matter how she wanted to. She would wake the baby.
Even as she stepped up to the tree and pressed her forehead against the bark, those many screaming mouths impressing themselves on her skin, she was not satiated.
She could not smell Sharon’s perfume. The bark was not the gentle give of Sharon’s waist and thighs.
The ghosts they’d been here had long fled, exorcised to some other, kinder dimension.
The baby shifted in her arms and let out a tiny wail.
“Shhh. It’s okay, little one.” Mary bounced her, and she settled back into that deep sleep only babies are capable of.
She stared up into the canopy. So much green it was if the leaves had remade the sky into something alien. Those endless branches, some bare, but most heavily laden, so plentiful it made her dizzy.
So many of the bare branches were sharp. The beauty of the leaves a disguise against something far more insidious. A trap set for an unsuspecting creature.
She wondered what it would be like to hang herself from one of them. To pierce her heart with one of those sharp ends and leave her body to rot. Food for the scavengers. If she would finally find some sort of peace or just another form of hell.
Something shifted in the branches, and she startled. Some animal. A movement too quick to track, but she felt a presence there. The sensation of something looking back at her.
Another burst of movement. Dark fur. The quick flash of an eye.
She peered upward at the fur in confusion. It was too dark to be a squirrel. She knew there were other sorts, but she’d only ever seen gray squirrels, and the fur was too plentiful, too smooth to identify as any other animal she could think of.
If only it wasn’t so green, she would be able to see better. She squinted and shaded her eyes as she watched whatever it was in the tree unfold, and she realized then, it wasn’t fur she was looking at. Not fur at all.
It was hair.
Two women looked back at her, their hair bound into a single braid. Forever joined in waking death. And she knew who they were. What they were. She’d known the parable Pastor Brighton told since she was a girl, but she’d always dismissed it as a childish story.
The Dark Sisters.
She wanted to scream. To tuck the baby tight against her and run.
But the same thing that compelled her to come to the tree locked her in place, and wasn’t there a part of her that wanted what was about to happen?
That had seen those sharpened branches and wondered about it only moments before?
To know the sensation of pushing herself onto one of those branches, her skin breaking open to let it in?
“This is a dream,” she said. But she knew it wasn’t.
Gently, she laid the baby on the ground and kissed her forehead.
“Mama loves you, Ada. So much,” she said, and turned back to the tree.
And then, she began to climb.