Chapter 48
Bastian
We know something is wrong the moment Evelyn walks through the front door carrying grocery bags. She usually shops on Sunday mornings—the sacred three hours when my sister Sybil watches the Bible Network and I conduct guerrilla warfare against The Witch.
Last Sunday, I loosened the screws on her reading glasses. The previous week, I put a dead roach in her underwear drawer.
But today is Thursday. Thanksgiving, according to the calendar in the kitchen—not that we’ve ever celebrated it. Evelyn considers holidays manufactured occasions for the weak-minded to indulge their basest impulses.
But here she is, unpacking a turkey. Stuffing mix. Cranberries. Sweet potatoes.
Thanksgiving things. Even recluses like us recognize them.
Sybil peeks around the kitchen door, her green eyes huge in her thin face. She’s thirteen now, but she still looks ten. Malnourishment, neglect, and isolation can do that to a girl.
“What’s happening?” she mouths at me where I’m standing on the other side of the doorjamb.
I shrug.
Evelyn catches us watching and sets down a bag of potatoes with a thump loud enough to make us both jump.
Her dark hair is up in a tight bun, her glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. One of the ear pieces is attached with tape. Guess those tiny screws are too hard to find with her failing eyesight.
She’s picked up weight the past couple of months, so she’s no longer a skeletal crone with sunken cheeks. It’s like she’s trying to look more human…not that she can fool us into thinking she’s anything but evil incarnate.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asks in her flat, tightly controlled voice.
“Thursday,” we say in unison.
Her hands pause while unwrapping the turkey, disapproval radiating off her in waves.
“Thanksgiving,” I say. “Which we don’t celebrate because—“
“This year is an exception,” Evelyn interrupts. “Consider it a sociological case study of sorts.” She glances over at us, her dark eyes narrowing as she sighs impatiently. “Dimwits like you would never understand.”
I bristle, but Sybil seems more interested in the food than our mother’s casual verbal abuse.
I suppose we’ve both grown accustomed to Evelyn’s opinions of us.
We’re simply the dumb, ungrateful spawn of the men who were worthy enough to knock her up, but not worthy enough to remain in her presence after.
At least, that’s what she tells us.
I know it’s a lie, but I keep that knowledge to myself. Letting Sybil believe that Evelyn chased away our respective fathers seems a lesser evil than them knowingly abandoning us with her.
“Can I help with dinner?” Sybil asks sweetly.
I’m not sure who’s more shocked—me or Evelyn.
We’re not allowed in the kitchen. She must have left the door unlocked because her hands were full. Evelyn prepares all our meals—controlling every aspect of our nutrition. Sybil hasn’t so much as cooked a boiled egg.
I can’t blame her. Her meals are half the size of mine, and mine are barely enough to keep me standing.
Even more shocking, Evelyn hesitates and casts my sister a thoughtful glance.
Is she actually considering—
“Are you insinuating I’m not capable of preparing a meal?” Her voice is light, as if she’s joking.
Evelyn never jokes. It’s always, always a trap.
Thankfully, Billy hasn’t gone completely delirious at the sight of so much delicious food. “Of course not, Mother,” she murmurs respectfully, dropping her head. “I was just offering my help, if you wished it.”
“I do not wish it.” Evelyn sneers at her. “What I do wish is for you two to vanish from my sight before you give me a migraine.”
We’re already halfway up the stairs when she calls out, “Wait!”
Shit.
Reluctantly, we trudge back to the kitchen door.
“Since you have so much time on your hands, you will both write a paper on the topic of gratitude.” Evelyn bends to fiddle with the oven’s dials, and I have to force back the urge to rush over and shove her head inside.
Instead, I glance at Sybil and find her already frowning at me.
“Three thousand words,” our mother continues. “Due by dinner.”
“Gratitude, as in what we’re grateful for?” I venture bravely. Talking back to Evelyn is dangerous, but making assumptions is worse.
“Did you misplace your dictionary?” Evelyn rises to full height, but as she turns to us, I grab Sybil’s hand and tug her upstairs behind me.
My mind is racing as I try to figure out what Evelyn’s endgame is.
“This doesn’t make sense, Bash,” Sybil says as soon as I’ve closed our bedroom door behind us.
Evelyn prefers we stay hidden so we don’t give her migraines with our ‘incessant nattering.’ We don’t have a key, but she only enters for her weekly inspection.
“Is she going to take us to The Bad Place?” Sybil asks.
“I don’t know,” I mutter.
“Maybe she’s poisoning the food. Do you think she’s poisoning the food?”
“I don’t know, Billy!”
Sybil glowers at me, because I’ve made a habit of knowing things. It’s one of the few ways I can pass the time without dying of boredom. I’ve read nearly every book in the house—twice.
I already suspect our mother is an antisocial narcissist, but even what’s happening right now doesn’t fit any of her usual patterns of behavior.
So I don’t know, and that’s frustrating as hell.
What I do know is that something is very, very wrong.
Ever since she finished her latest paper a couple of months ago, Evelyn has been acting strange. Where before she hardly ever left her study in the attic, these days she’s been flitting off at random times during the week on all manner of mysterious errands.
When we dared ask, she gave vague replies about meeting her publisher.
She began wearing lipstick and reeking of perfume. Taking calls in her bedroom with the door locked. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was dating someone.
But Evelyn never seeks pleasure. She exists solely to torment her children and write labyrinthine academic papers that never get published.
Not after being abandoned by her children’s fathers.
She always made it out as if she was the one who sent them packing, and we believed her because no one ever comes to this house. Not twice, anyway.
Then I found the letters in her closet.
They’d both left her—Sybil’s father, and mine.
From what I could piece together from the letters, my father, Jonathan, was a traveling salesman.
He came through our town on business one day and, most unfortunately, met my mother.
They had a whirlwind affair that appears to only have lasted a couple of days, maybe a week, before he took off again.
I know this because every letter she sent to his address was returned, she kept them…and I read them all.
She begged him to return to care for his son. Begged him to reply. Then demanded he swallow a handful of razor blades.
Evelyn’s relationship with Sybil’s father was a nearly identical pattern.
They screwed enough times for Evelyn to conceive, only for him to disappear.
In both instances, our fathers took off before they knew Evelyn was pregnant.
Unfortunately, neither deemed the responsibility of fatherhood enough of a lure to return.
By then they’d probably realized how batshit crazy Evelyn was.
“Bash?”
Billy’s voice pulls me back to the here and now. She’s at the desk we share, a blank piece of paper in front of her, gnawing on the end of her pencil. The window behind the desk shows thick drifts of snow dusting down, swirling like a snow globe every time the wind blows.
“I can’t think of anything I’m grateful for,” she says miserably.
I shrug, grabbing my notebook and falling down on my bed, ankle propped on my knee. “So make something up.”
My sister’s pencil scritches for a few minutes, then stops. “Is this a test, or an experiment?”
We have a running theory that everything The Witch tells us to do is some form of test—which we always fail—or an experiment for one of her papers.
I muse over Billy’s question. “This feels like an experiment.”
We prefer experiments to tests because the negative effects are usually delayed.
“Hm.” Sybil tilts her head, then carries on writing.
I do the same, but my mind isn’t on gratitude.
It’s on the smell drifting up from the kitchen.
Roasting turkey. Some kind of herb and butter. Something sweet—pie, maybe?
My stomach cramps until I press my fist against it.
This house is our prison. We aren’t allowed to leave, not even to play outside. Evelyn home schools us, keeps the doors and windows locked, and is so awful to anyone who dares show up unannounced at the door that they never return.
We’ve both learned to survive—mentally and physically—on the scraps she gives us.
I’ve figured out a way to open our bedroom window, but I only risk going out a few hours each night.
I always end my rendezvous with a trip to the corner bakery at the crack of dawn.
When I realized their staff arrived at 3am most mornings, I knocked until one of them got annoyed and came to see what I wanted.
It’s become a ritual for me to buy some of the previous day’s stale pastries with coins I pilfer from Evelyn’s purse.
So far, Evelyn hasn’t noticed the missing money or my empty bed. Though Sybil always stays awake when I’m out in case our mother does a spot check in the middle of the night.
We shared a brick-hard Danish this morning, but I let Sybil have the powdered donut all to herself because it’s her favorite.
She wolfed it down in three bites.
Our breakfast was a tiny portion of Wheaties with skimmed milk, and half a mushy banana each. Evelyn forgot about lunch and then swept out the door before either of us had scared up the nerve to beg for food.
That’s why this feels like an experiment.
The smells coming from downstairs would have been torturous on a normal day, but to a starving child it feels like hell incarnate.
“I’m drowning in my own spit,” Billy says mournfully from the desk an hour later.
“You can live without food for a week.”
“Can you live without your head?” Billy snaps.
I slowly lower my notebook, staring at Billy with wide eyes. She’s hunched over the desk, her hands on her stomach, glaring down at the paper like she’s developing one of Mother’s infamous migraines.
“You okay over there, Billy?”
My sister twists in her seat, turning her scowl on me. “Do I look okay?”
She doesn’t. Not one bit.
Her skin is nearly translucent, eyes shadowed, cheeks hollow. She looks like a cadaver.
“What the hell,” I mumble, forcing my eyes back to my notebook. “Kill a guy for asking.”
She turns back to her paper, then stiffens. “Bash!”
My eyes flick back to her as she stands in a rush.
I sit up, assuming it’s low blood pressure again. She swoons every other day. Usually, Evelyn’s fed us some kind of lunch by now. It’s almost time for our paltry supper, in fact.
“Have you had water?” I say, getting up and heading for the bathroom. “You know you need to drink water when—”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Billy mutters as I walk past her.
“What—”
She throws me a furious look, claps her hands over her backside, and rushes into the bathroom so fast she knocks me with a bony shoulder en-route.
The door slams in my face.
“Jeez! What the hell?”
“Go away!” she yells in a strangled voice.
“What? Why? What’s wrong?” I grab the door handle—our bathroom doesn’t have a lock either—but stop myself from going in.
It wouldn’t be the first time she got an upset stomach from the pastries. It just usually happens a lot earlier in the day.
But then I hear her crying.
“Billy!”
She doesn’t tell me to go away again. Doesn’t stop crying. So I push open the door a crack.
“You okay?”
“Y-Yes,” she blubbers.
“You don’t sound okay.”
“I-I’m fine. G-God is just t-testing me.”
I grit my teeth as I push into the bathroom. “You gotta stop it with that shit again, Bill—”
My sister is on the toilet, but that’s not why I cut off.
There’s blood on the underwear stretched between her skinny calves, and streaks of it down her leg where she tugged the fabric down.
Is she hemorrhaging?
No…wait, it’s just her period. And judging from the shock on her face, this is her first menstrual cycle ever.
Despite what Evelyn thinks, her children aren’t dimwits. And since we have nothing better to do all day, we read.
We read a lot.
“Jeez, okay,” I blurt out like an idiot. “Look, uh, just—don’t panic, okay. I’m gonna—“
“Does it look like I’m panicking?” Billy grits out.
“It kinda does.”
Her eyes flicker, then her gaze drops. “Okay, fine. I’m panicking.” She reaches for the toilet paper, then hesitates. “Can you get me…if you don’t mind…in my top drawer—“
“Got it.” I back out of the bathroom and head over to the chest of drawers, opening Sybil’s side and grabbing a pair of panties. I go back inside the bathroom, staring as she wipes at her legs with some wadded-up tissue.
She pauses, then looks up at me with haunted green eyes. “You have to call The Witch,” she murmurs.
“Shit.” I hesitate, and I hate myself for it. “Now, though?”
Sybil looks away, pursing her lips. “We can hide this, or we can risk disturbing her.” Her eyes swivel back up to me. “In your professional opinion, brother, which would make her angrier?”