Chapter 10
10
JACOB
I t’s hot in the cabin.
I didn’t expect it to have central air, but it’s so hot.
The heat creeps up slowly, like a rising tide, and by the time it gets to my knees, there’s no hope of getting out. Rolling over is a pipe dream. All I’d do is get a faceful of sand, and what good is that? Sand isn’t edible. It’s not breathable. It won’t do anything but melt my skin off.
But—
I don’t recall lying down on a beach. A beach wouldn’t feel smooth, like sheets.
There must be sheets. A pillow. The blankets must be the problem. My mother always traveled with an electric blanket to fry herself in, though she never seemed to get warm. For some reason, she’s covered me in one of her blankets and set it to broil.
It’s hard to move my foot.
I persevere.
Nothing changes. I’m not under any blankets. I’m not even under any sheets. It’s air on bare skin, so it shouldn’t be unbearable.
Unless someone’s planned this.
Lots of terrible things don’t happen by accident. Did you know? They happen as a result of meticulous prearrangement. Niceties take less planning, I’ve found. Counterintuitively, profound evil is more difficult, especially if you want to cloak it in a veneer of civility, if not goodness.
Have you spoken to him? I don’t know who that is, and then I do. It’s my father. His game room—the one with low lights in sconces and a custom-build card table—blinks into existence. Ah—it’s my clothes that are burning me alive. Funeral clothes will do that. I must’ve left them on after I went to the funeral for Gabriel’s parents.
“No.” Hurts to talk. Is that because I didn’t cry at the funeral? It’s not as if I didn’t cry at all. I’m not made of stone. But the grief in that room was so intense that I wanted to sob and couldn’t. It wasn’t my parents who were dead. My parents were still alive.
“Best if you don’t,” Bettencourt says from the other side of the card table, his cards a neat fan in his hands.
“There are better options when it comes to your future prospects,” my dad agrees. I can’t see him. He must be sitting back from the table, in the shadows.
“I don’t know why you’d say that.”
“Because he’s ruined already.” Samuel Newhouse lays down a card. It’s hearts. Or diamonds. The corners are all smeared with blood that makes it impossible to be sure which. “You know that, Jacob. You’ve always known what it means to remain above reproach.”
I laugh out loud, but it hurts like knives, or a lump full of dry sand and shards of glass. “Is that what I’m supposed to do? Remain above reproach?”
Bettencourt looks me up and down. “You’ve grown out of your suit.”
“I haven’t.”
But then the waistband’s cutting into me, and the cuffs on the jacket are so tight my hands are swelling, and I can’t breathe. I undo the top button on my shirt. It doesn’t help.
“I’m not doing that anymore.” Bettencourt can think whatever he’s going to think about me. I’m done with all my old methods. “And you’re dead.”
Bettencourt lays down his cards and cocks his head to the side as if I’ve said something he’s never considered before. He opens his mouth to speak and keeps opening it, wider and wider and wider like he’s trying to chew the air and chokes, his breaths crackling and curling into a wet, nasty struggle. His face goes pink and then red and then purple. He puts one hand to his chest, clawing at his shirt, and then he whimpers, holy fucking Jesus Christ, he whimpers like a beaten animal and slumps back in his chair.
“Jacob. How could you?”
I finally locate my father. He’s in a chair set back a few feet from the table with his hands cuffed behind his back, dressed in a jumpsuit the exact color of a grapefruit.
“I’m not angry, son.” His face folds into a frown I’ve seen deployed at infinite black tie events and more than a few white tie galas. “I’m disappointed.”
“I didn’t do that to him.”
“Him?” My father raises his eyebrows. “I’m talking about you.”
“There’s no need for this conversation, then. I know you’re disappointed. Where is my sense of family? Where is my loyalty?”
“You could at least look the part. I know I raised you better than this. Always have a plan in place. That goes for your personal well-being as well as your professional pursuits.”
My clothes get tighter. That can’t be happening. I’m not growing out of them. I reached my adult height at twenty-one, and it took years after that to come to terms with the basis for my adult weight. Years. I’m not going back, and I’m not still growing, for fuck’s sake. I’m not.
“I’ve never managed to understand why you care, Dad.”
He shrugs. The handcuffs keep the gesture from its full range of motion. “You embarrass me. You embarrass your mother. You’re doing this all over again just to make fools of us in public.”
The button on my pants pops off and flies into a corner of the room.
“You’re such a sick fuck.”
“Who says?”
Bettencourt’s corpse has begun to expand, too, rotting in triple-time right there on the card table. Sam Newhouse plays another card. He brushes Bettencourt’s puffy hand out of the way distractedly. “Your turn, James.”
I’m not sure how I didn’t see James Hill when I first got here, because his burned body is unmissable. He has to be dead—nobody can be that burned and survive—but his blackened fingers twitch on a card at the edge of the table. Flakes of ash flutter down to the felt surface when he tries to pick one up. Bone, whiter than the cards, shows through the missing skin.
I’m going to be sick.
“Best if you don’t,” Newhouse mentions. “Hill, was that your move?”
I turn my back on all of them and go out into the hallway.
It’s not the hallway I expected. It’s the hallway at the private school Gabriel and I attended before his parents died and I let him suffer for years. Light streams in on dark, polished hardwood. Dust motes sparkle lazily in the air. I’m stuffed to the gills, and if my clothes get any tighter, they’ll cut through my skin and maybe through my bones. I don’t know what it’s called when a person dies from being hacked to death by his own school uniform. It was tailored to fit. This shouldn’t be happening.
I know where the restroom is on this floor, but every door I try leads into a teacher’s lounge or an art studio or the closet where they store the basketballs in the gym. It smelled like old rubber and industrial cleaning products, but during the stretches when nobody had class, I could kiss my boyfriend uninterrupted for half an hour or forty-five minutes at a time. I could kiss him until he went weak in the knees, then do whatever else he wanted. Anything else he wanted. And when I stood up again and his eyes were all dark and his cheeks were all pink and he couldn’t string a full sentence together, I was perfect.
For a little while.
I find the bathroom at the last possible moment, my stomach clenched around the food I’d eaten for lunch, calorically calibrated to appear healthful and nourishing by the woman my mother hired for the purpose. I couldn’t remember her name to save my life. She packed those lunches in a bento box that fit alongside an ice pack in its container. It was always cold when I opened it at the table, my jacket slung over the chair behind me. It was always perfect. Every time.
It’s been in my stomach less than twenty minutes when I heave all of it up and flush it away. There. There. My clothes aren’t so awful anymore.
What they are is loose. Too loose. The air conditioning kicks on and blows a stiff, icy breeze down the length of my spine. I pull my jacket tighter around my body, but the cold keeps coming.
“Jacob?” The soft creak of the bathroom door swinging open reaches me after the voice, which is wrong, but then everything about this situation seems wrong, so maybe it’s good that the door is consistent. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay, handsome.” I wipe my mouth on my sleeve, put a smile on, and leave the stall.
The smile drops off his face the second his eyes meet mine. “Jacob?”
“What?”
“What happened?” He comes closer and touches my face. His pupils—swimming in green, a gorgeous shade of green—aren’t blown with pleasure. They’re terrified pinpricks. “Tell me what happened.”
I pull away from his hand, though I don’t want to, and look in the mirror.
Blood trickles down from my forehead, slicing across my nose in a thin, dark line. As I watch, deep shadows bruise my undereyes and spread like spilled oil. My eyes are bloodshot, the red standing out against the blue. That would happen, on occasion. That happens? I suppose it’s still happening. Burst blood vessels. A raw pain in my throat.
“I’m just tired.” I turn back to Gabriel with a smile shellacked in place.
He’s gone.
Catherine stands in the middle of the restroom, staring up at me with wide, horrified eyes. “The man’s eyes were down here. And on an angle. Like the guy was bent over. And they were too big to be a normal person’s eyes. They were like an animal’s, but…too round. Too white. They were too white, Jacob. He couldn’t have been real. But he was. And then I saw his arm.”
Kitten, I want to say. That was a long time ago. I’m sure it was a long time ago.
No words come out of my mouth. Nothing works.
Catherine’s eyes get wider. “Like that.” She points at my left arm, her hand trembling. “His arm was hanging down just like that.”
I’m the nightmare. I’m the fucking nightmare. I’m the thing that came to scare her at the door. I wanted inside. I wanted to scare her. I wanted to hurt her.
No. No. No . That cannot be true. I’ve never wanted to scare Catherine.
She presses her lips together, the color fading. Ice particles collect on her eyelashes. Her clothes shift, becoming pieces I don’t recognize, becoming her riding clothes. The plain wall of the restroom fades out behind her, and in its place is a forest covered in snow.
It must be me. I must be the one freezing us to death. A part of me I thought I’d left behind approves, because if I’m cold, I’m doing something right. I’m sticking with the plan. I’m keeping myself in check.
But Catherine’s teeth chatter, so we can’t stay here.
She frowns at me. “You acted like you were interested in me.”
“Who said I wasn’t interested?”
Her honey eyes glitter. “I knew you’d say that. You did the same things to everyone else in the room. All the women who were there fell for you, and half of the men.”
“It was more than half.”
She smiles, wide and sharp, almost as if she’ll laugh.
Catherine doesn’t laugh. The smile dies away. Her face falls into such complete disappointment that I feel it in my toes.
“You’re not like that anymore. I don’t want you like this. You’re embarrassing.”
I haven’t felt so small in years. I don’t mean to flinch away, but once I’ve done it, I can’t stop. I don’t have any idea what I’m reaching for. My hand meets something soft.
“I don’t have to eat. I won’t. Don’t let me. I know what I look like. I’ll be better as soon as I can.”
“Jacob.” A cool hand on my shoulder. A breeze? “Jacob. Can you hear me? This is, like, not good, and I’m starting to get really freaked?—”
Catherine’s voice fades out. Where did she go? I turn around to look for her, but the forest is empty, and there’s no snow. It’s all melted away to reveal huge leaves and brilliant green bushes and plants with blood-red flowers blooming from stems. The petals look dangerously sharp. They look like they’re already bleeding. Droplets fall from the tips of the petals onto the green leaves below in a steady dripdripdrip. If it gets any louder, it’ll be rain. How many of those fucking flowers are there? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how many?
“Jacob.” Her voice comes from a different direction. “I’m over here.”
I can’t see her.
Something cool touches my face. It moves carefully over my forehead and my cheeks. The heat relents. It doesn’t go away, but it eases just enough that my lungs only feel like they might melt and not as if they’re actively melting.
“Jacob,” Catherine says. More of that blessed cool. A washcloth, I think. “Jacob, wake up. I need you to tell me what to do.”
I would have sworn on any holy book that my eyes were already open. Now they feel pinned shut. I don’t want to disappoint Catherine, however, so I summon all my strength and will and pry them open.
It does not feel good. In the process of summoning all my strength, I put myself firmly in the midst of a wave of hellish sensations. Every cut on my body is raw and open. My heartbeat is part of my skin. My jaw aches.
Catherine looks down at me, and after a few beats, I understand that she’s perched on the side of the bed in the mysterious cottage we found. It’s real, unless this another dream. I don’t think it is. My vision was clear in my dreams. Here, in the cottage, everything shimmers, including Catherine. I can see her, shimmering, because it’s daytime. Sunlight washes in through the cottage’s two windows. The breeze blows daintily across my forehead.
“Did I—” Talking is an arduous task. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. I’m very good at talking. I’m very charming. It shouldn’t hurt like this, or be so difficult to choose the right words. “Did I wake you?”
“No, of course not.” I think Catherine might be lying. “I’m sorry I had to wake you up. I don’t know what to do, and I think it’s—” Her chin wobbles. “I think it might be pretty bad.”
“What might be pretty bad?”
“You have a fever. It’s really high.” Catherine glances down at my torso. With the effort of my life, I push myself up on my elbow and follow her gaze. Oh—she’s right. That is quite bad. The scratches on my sides were reopened, some of them deeper than before, and they’re surrounded by red, inflamed skin. “And I think your cuts are infected.”
I drop back onto the pillow. “Oh, don’t worry, kitten. It’ll sort itself out. I just need a nap.”