Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
I’m watching the little red light winking on a video camera, which has been positioned at the end of the dining table. The rabbit corpses have been cleared away and the table wiped clean but the smell still lingers, the one Paul spoke of, the one that had haunted poor Terry to the end. Iron and pennies and marzipan.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask Alice a third time, turning to look at her.
Paul coaxed her out of her gloomy bedroom with a promise of pizza but she still looks nervous and unsure, winding her long hair around her finger. Alice is wearing the same baggy T-shirt she wore the day I arrived ( POBODY’S NERFECT! ) and now she is beginning to smell stale and slightly sour. Her blond hair is dark with grease.
“Because you don’t have to, you know. No one is forcing you.”
“I know,” she tells me.
Paul smiled unpleasantly when Sam had told him his idea, eyes pricked with a bright gleam. He said, “Whatever you need to do to make it work, Sam,” and patted him on the shoulder with something like fellowship. It made me think of Masonic rituals and a sly, unscrupulous brotherhood. I reach out to Alice and squeeze her hand briefly, just once. Sam’s eyes slide to me and then to the camera, speaking in a loud, clear voice.
“It’s just gone twelve-thirty on Friday, the thirtieth of June, and I’m here with Alice Webber and Mina Ellis at Beacon Terrace. We are about to conduct a séance in which we will try to contact the so-called witch that Alice released from the bottle at Tanner’s Row.”
He looks back to Alice.
“Okay, Alice, let’s begin.”
Alice drops her chin to her chest. I watch the slow rise and fall of her shoulders. A minute goes by in silence, then another. Sam and I exchange a nervous glance.
“Alice? You okay?” I ask in a voice that is almost steady. Almost.
Nothing. Just the tightness of her fingertips pressing into the table, turning her nail beds white. In the silence I’m intensely aware of the strip light buzzing like high-voltage tinnitus. I glance up at it and what I see repulses me. Inside, the casing is crawling with wasps. It bristles with them.
“She’s here,” Alice says and I feel it, right in that moment. A sensation of kinesis; the skin tightening on my bones, a stomach drop like a descent. It’s a similar sensation to driving over a humpback bridge. Sam must feel it, too, because he shifts uncomfortably, looking around as if someone has just walked up behind him.
“Who?” he asks. “Who’s here?”
Alice lifts her head. Her pupils are fat blots of ink. She stares at Sam and her lips curl slowly and with menace. I’ve heard of your blood running cold before but I haven’t believed it was a real thing until this moment. When she speaks, her voice is silky and soft, slightly lisping.
“Little Maggie. Margaret. She didn’t like it when you called her that though, did she? It used to make her mad. She has your hair, the same color. Like autumn leaves.”
Sam swallows. I see it, the expression on his face. Like a wince of pain.
“Maggie?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see her, Alice? What does she look like?”
Alice hesitates, swiping her tongue across her lower lip. Perhaps it is a trick of the light but just for a moment it looks stained black, the color of bruises.
“Not how you remember her.”
“Oh?”
“When we shed our corporeal forms, the dead become transformed.”
“Into what?” Sam is up, hovering an inch away from his chair now, leaning over the table. I’m studying Alice. Corporeal? I think. It’s hard to equate this cold, toneless girl with the one who was giggling and reading horoscopes to me. If it’s a trick, it’s a very clever one.
“Sam—” I say, warningly. He doesn’t even look at me, simply waves me away.
“Into what, Alice? Transformed into what?”
“Your daughter has become a creature of bone and light. Her skin is a cage, rattling teeth in an empty, eyeless head.”
“Jesus,” I whisper, and in that moment Alice turns her knife-gaze to me and I shrink away from her. An insectile itch crawls up my spine and into my scalp. It burrows and slithers and makes me want to rip off my fucking skin.
“Careful, Mina,” Alice says, and the way her voice curls around the letters hurts, it hurts, like the sound of my name coming from her mouth is barbed and I can’t move. She pins me against the chair with one foot in the other world, beyond the veil, the wasps buzzing in the light shade. Alice peels her gaze back to Sam and my chest expands, filling with air. Relief.
“You abandoned her. Little Margaret. Why did you do that, Sam?”
He looks briefly at the camera and then to me. His voice jolts, too loud, fingers gripping the edge of the table.
“Don’t. Don’t say that. I didn’t abandon her.”
I cast a glance over my shoulder. That sensation of weirdness, of something being a little off-center is growing stronger. I can hear those sounds again, the ones I heard on my first night in the house that made me think of Black Shuck the hellhound, panting and snarling and spewing white foam. I wonder if the camera will pick it up. Sam doesn’t seem to notice. His cheeks are slowly reddening, becoming inflamed. He rakes his fingers through his hair.
“All those wires,” Alice says playfully. “They came out of her like tentacles. Poor Maggie. The hospital floors made your shoes squeak, didn’t they? Sometimes you still hear it, at night. Soft-soled shoes on polished floors, the echo of the ward. Maggie heard it, too. You thought she didn’t, but she did. She heard all of it, even at the end.”
Sam’s face twists into a grimace. He locks his hands together in a pleading gesture and says in a low, trembling voice, “Tell Maggie I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was afraid.”
Alice smiles but her voice is full of menace.
“You left her to die in a strange bed in a frightening place.”
Sam looks at me desperately and I don’t know what to say. No wonder he has gone to such lengths trying to find her, I think. It must hollow you out, the guilt.
“It was the hospital. I don’t— I was so afraid of—of seeing what was happening to her!”
I want to comfort him, to put a hand on his arm, say soothing words. But I’m too afraid that Alice will turn and look at me again with that baneful stare. I don’t know how Sam is managing it, the weight of her judgment. He repeats himself, “Tell her, Alice! Tell her I’m sorry.”
The noise at the kitchen door has changed texture, deepening to a scratching as if something is digging its way in. Sam slowly turns his head.
“What is that?”
“Don’t,” I warn him, as he rises from his chair, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. Alice’s lips pull back from her teeth. It’s how I imagine someone would try to smile if they have only ever had a smile described to them. Her eyes swivel in their sockets and a bubble of something black swells and pops between her parted lips.
“Don’t open it, Sam. It’s not what you think.”
I’m reaching for him too late, he’s already brushing past me. He looks as if he has aged a decade, unsteady on his feet.
“Is it her? Is she here? Alice? You said she was here.”
Fear leeches all the saliva from my mouth because I see what he is about to do. Sam walks across the kitchen toward the door. The scratching is becoming more frantic and now the door seems to be bowing inward as if something of a great weight and force were pressing in on the other side of it. The wood groans under the pressure.
“Sam, that isn’t her, it’s not Maggie. Sam!”
He’s not listening. He is standing in front of the door with his T-shirt untucked and his hands opening and closing into fists. Her bones are a cage, rattling teeth in an empty, eyeless head , I think, and when I look at Alice her eyes have cleared, her face slack with shock.
“What’s happening, Mina?” she asks, in a voice that finally sounds like her own. “What’s all that noise?”
“Sam!” I jolt out of my seat, meaning to stop him but even now I can see his hand is reaching for the doorknob, his ghastly smile, caught in profile, painfully happy and relieved and earnest. He thinks it is his daughter, his Maggie. He thinks she has returned.
“Sam, don’t—”
Too late. He swings the door open. A silence descends like an axe falling, heavy as lead. I feel the abrupt sensation of a connection severed, the shock of it. Out there the hall is empty, sickly yellow sunlight slicing through the frosted glass in the front door. Sam is panting as if winded, his expression tortured. He switches around to look at Alice and spits as he talks, seemingly unable to restrain himself.
“Where is she, Alice? Where’s Maggie?”
Alice looks from me to Sam, her expression blank and uncomprehending. Overhead, the wasps toil against the light shade.
“Where’s my little girl?”
Sam’s voice breaks and he bows his head. My nerves are shot, my voice trembling as I ask, “Alice, hey. Hey, look at me. When you said ‘she’s here,’ who did you mean?”
“Her. The witch woman,” she whispers, barely audible. “She left her mark on the door.”
I stand up slowly, chair scraping over the floor. Sam lifts his head and pulls the door inward so the whole panel becomes visible. There is a moment of long, spun silence before Sam says very quietly, “Get the camera, Mina.”
I pull it from the tripod, holding it with both hands to keep it steady. The video camera is bulky and noisy, with PROPERTY OF THE WESTERN HERALD stamped on the casing. I fill the frame with the image of the outside of the kitchen door, brushing past Sam who is standing motionless, mouth hung slightly open in shock. I linger on the places where the paint has been gouged all the way down to the wood, the places where the panels have splintered and cracked. I think of those snarling, grinding sounds, and my whole body turns cold, skin raw with gooseflesh. Out here in the hallway that sweet smell of spoilage is rich and soupy. I turn the camera so that the whole door can be seen, motioning to Sam to step aside so I can capture it all. It’s that comet shape again, the one I saw burned into the rafter on Tanner’s Row and chalked on the pavement outside—the witch’s “mark” Bert had called it—and now here it is, rendered so large the long tail scrapes beyond the doorframe and into the wallpaper, ending about a foot down the hall. Some of the scratches are raked so deep the plasterboard is starting to peel away. I lower the camera, stunned into silence. Sam looks at me and I can’t read his expression. His face is pained, deeply lined. He looks like he’s just woken from a nightmare.
“I need to take a walk,” he says, not looking at me, not looking at Alice. “I need to get out of this house.”