Chapter Twenty-Two
TWENTY-TWO
As I turn onto Beacon Terrace on my way back from the green, I see an elderly woman with a shopping trolley on the same stretch of pavement as me. I don’t think too much about it, other than supposing she is going for her groceries now curfew has been lifted for the day. It’s only as she nears the Webber house that I realize the woman has swerved out into the road, walking in a large semicircle and only mounting the curb again once she is past the front gate. All the while she is staring at number thirteen with such suspicion and fear that it takes me straight back to Paul skinning rabbits and saying scared people do strange things. I scuff at the faded chalk markings with my feet. I think of Vicky lying in a coma, intubated, throat stung fat and swollen. Someone has wiped away the words on the fence and written new ones, not in chalk but in thick black paint. It no longer says bE Not afrAId.
It now reads Burn The Witch.
Paul is smoking restlessly in the doorway when I reach the porch, as if he has been looking out for my arrival. He looks amped up, muscles twitching under his skin. “Who’s up there with her, Mina?” he barks at me. I can see sweat glistening on his skin. “Who’s she talking to?”
I follow him slowly to the bottom of the stairs, listening. I can hear Alice’s voice, strident and loud, like a burned-out priest administering last rites. I climb a little farther up the stairs until I can see through the gap in the banister. Alice’s bedroom door is closed. I catch a trace of that smell, so dark it is almost bloody. Her voice rings out, now singing a song.
“This is a shit show. I thought you were meant to do something! I thought you were here to help her!”
He runs a hand over his face, Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively in his throat. His voice is hard-knuckled, ugly.
“Paul, you have to calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when you fix my daughter!”
I bite back the urge to tell him Alice doesn’t need fixing, that she isn’t broken. Instead I say, “Where’s Sam?”
Paul shrugs.
“God knows. He took off after that séance, didn’t he? Probably halfway over the Tamar by now.”
I climb the stairs barefoot and silent, trying to catch what Alice is saying but her voice is so slippery and the words are a language I no longer recognize. Her voice dips and rises like a spring tide and by the time I’m pushing open the bedroom door and saying, “Alice, I’m coming in,” I’m almost sure she is speaking an old, eldritch language, something buried in a peat bog or dug out of the ice.
Alice is sitting on her bed with her back to the room. She is cross-legged, T-shirt sticking to her spine in damp, sweaty patches, the sunburned skin of her neck visible with her head bowed forward. Her hands are clasped over her ears, voice loud and unmusical. I open my mouth to get her attention when a flicker of movement catches my eye. My heart ratchets up, throat tight. My head turns toward the fireplace where I could have sworn a clutch of pale fingers has quickly withdrawn into the black throat of the chimney; nails dirty and rimed with soot, skin limpid and gray. My pulse ticks at the back of my eyeballs, my breath fish-hooked in my throat. There is nothing there.
No. No. I’m tired. My mind is playing tricks on me.
Still, though. Still. It’s as if my synapses have been deadened and cauterized. I stare at the fireplace and when Alice turns her head stiffly and looks at me I wonder if she knows just how frightened I am.
“Did you see her, Mina?” she whispers.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t see a thing.”
I step toward Alice, noticing the Walkman on the floor beside her, headphones spooled messily.
“The batteries have died,” she says softly, lowering her hands. “Now I can hear her all the time. I’ve tried everything but I can’t drown her out.”
I stare at her. Sitting this way with her feet tucked beneath her, she looks younger than her years, her face a portrait of mis ery. I wonder if we pushed her too far with the séance, if our very presence here has simply made things worse. I hear Oscar’s voice telling me I wasn’t ready for this, that I was unexperienced, unprepared. Alice looks up at me.
“I just want to be normal,” she whispers. I take a step toward her.
“Alice, you need to listen to me. Yesterday I went up to that house on Tanner’s Row. I gathered together all the broken pieces of the witch’s bottle and brought it back here.”
“Why?”
“So I can prove to you that it’s just a bottle. You need to see that with your own eyes. Yes, there’s some gross stuff inside it—pee and hair and bent pins—but that’s all it is.”
My heart is still beating uncomfortably fast and I’m not convinced my voice is quite steady. I don’t like being so close to that fireplace, the dark void above it. I wonder if I will see those fingers tonight in my dreams, pale and arachnid.
“We choose how much power we give others over us, Alice. Right now, you’re handing over all the power to nothing more than broken glass and bad intentions. You think you’re not in control but you are, you are. ”
Alice laughs. It is somehow both gentle and horribly mean.
“Sure, Mina. Okay.”
I draw level with her. The floorboard creaks slowly under my weight. Alice doesn’t look up at me as she speaks.
“You know one night, just after I got sick, I woke up and Tamsin was sitting here on the floor right about where we are now. Just sitting there smiling and looking up at the fireplace. I was half-asleep and I must have said something like, ‘What are you doing, it’s the middle of the night,’ and Tamsin whispered, ‘There’s a kitten stuck up in the chimney. Can you hear it?’
“And I could, Mina. I could! A tiny mewing like a little cat was trapped up there, sad and hungry. Poor little thing, I remember thinking, and then Tamsin started to move forward as if to reach out for it and that’s when I saw the witch’s black eye gleaming through the hole and I got out of bed pretty quick after that. I grabbed hold of Tamsin and I dragged her away from the fireplace. At the same time that mewing started to change. It began sounding like squealing, like a pig stuck in a trap. Urgh. Just thinking about it makes me feel cold all over. Tamsin started shouting ‘get off me’ and twisting her arm so fiercely I thought it might just snap. I think I still would’ve held on to her though, even if it had. Even if the bone had come through the skin I would’ve kept her away from that black hole and that horrible noise that didn’t sound like a kitten no more. You see, the witch, she was trying to draw Tamsin in, and if she did that I wouldn’t see my sister ever again.”
Alice looks over to the fireplace, her face waxy-looking and stricken with fear.
“I know you all think it’s pretending, like I’m a dumb little kid, but you can ask Tamsin, it happened. She was so mad at me she just about screamed the house down until everyone woke up and Mum come running in saying ‘what’s wrong what’s wrong’ and all I could tell her was the witch in the chimney wants to eat Tamsin. That’s about when Mum started crying. She said, ‘I can’t take much more of this, Alice, it has to stop.’ Like I was doing it on purpose.”
She stops and takes in a long, shaky breath. I think of Tamsin saying “I’m going to get a cat of my very own,” and the shoe in the grate, just waiting for Sam to reach for it. The bait, the lure. Gooseflesh creeps over my skin. I open my mouth to say something reassuring and that’s when my gaze drops into Alice’s lap and I see for the first time what she is holding. It’s my photograph, the one taken in Crete. I stare at it.
“Alice, where did you get that?”
She looks down at it with mild surprise.
“It’s him, isn’t it? Eddie. Your brother.”
“Have you been going through my things?”
I hear a strangled, gurgled laugh. I can’t be sure it came from Alice, not really. Her limbs draw closer to her chest, her eyes turned upward to look at me.
“She tells me things, you know. The witch. She tells me about how my daddy sometimes thinks about taking his deboning knife to one of us kids and opening up our ribs on the kitchen table. He thinks about that a lot. ”
Alice’s lip curls, like a snarl. Her tongue slides along her teeth and my heart jolts. I reach toward her.
“Alice—”
“She told me about Maggie, Sam’s little girl. She told me about you, Mina. You and Eddie.”
I’m suddenly filled with an urge to scream. It balloons in my throat until I can’t breathe. Alice lifts the photo and holds it up to face me.
“I know about the pond with the bad ice in the middle, how it had looked rotted and sunken somehow. Like a bad tooth. It was winter and the trees didn’t have any leaves and there was snow on the ground. You don’t like going home anymore, do you? Because of that day. Because of what happened.”
Fear, fattening in the cave of my heart. I feel it now, crawling all over my skin, tightening my scalp. I want to put my hands over my ears just like she had. I want to be at home watching Oscar fold the newspaper along the creases with tedious precision. I want to crawl under the bed and hide.
“Have you been talking to someone about me?”
“ She told me. She tells me everything.”
I feel breathless, rocked back on my feet. There is a buzzing sound, like a swarm of wasps, only it’s in my head, in my skull. Like they are nesting in there.
“My brother died a long time ago of pneumonia, Alice. There was nothing we could do.” I can feel myself growing anxious, it gnaws at me. “I didn’t know the ice was going to break. I thought it would hold!”
A beat. Alice’s tongue slips between her lips, just for a second. Black and glistening, a slug. Her voice is deeper, harsher.
“I know what you did, Meens. ”
That’s what does it, hearing my brother’s nickname for me in her mouth. I stare at Alice, eyes flared wide, heart pounding in my chest. It feels like something inside me is working loose, blackened as a rotting tooth. She looks up at me from beneath the spikes of her lashes, her mouth stretched into a slick and queasy grin that shows too many teeth.
“Is that her?” I say quietly, bending down and leaning toward her. I make sure her gaze is fixed on me. “Is she in there, Alice? The witch?”
Alice doesn’t respond but there is a deep clicking sound from the back of her throat, insectile and frightening. She peels her lips back farther.
“Can I talk to her? I’d like to ask her some questions.”
Clickclickclick . A bubble of saliva bursts between her teeth.
“You see, witch—I know something about you that Alice doesn’t.” I can hear the slow creak of the floorboards under my feet as I lean in close, the click- ing ratcheting in Alice’s throat, faster and faster, a sound like bones knitting together. I keep my voice to a whisper. “I know what you are. You’re a thought. You’re shame and guilt and repressed emotion. You’re not a hook in her brain, you’re just some bad memories and I’m going to help her scrub you away. You. Aren’t. Real. ”
The clicking stops so abruptly I almost forget to breathe. I can feel the blistering heat of Alice’s skin, can see the flare of her nostrils. She is breathing like a gored bull, shoulders flexing as she sucks in air, looking past me. Toward the fireplace.
“Alice?”
“Mina,” she whispers, barely moving her lips. “Don’t move.”
Her eyes are huge, gleaming white saucers. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. The urge to turn around and look over my shoulder is overwhelming but I am frozen in place, muscles stiff. Alice is shuffling slowly backward until she hits the wall, head shaking. Something scrapes in the chimney breast and then there is the sound of a low, meaty chuckle. I think of that old glass bottle stuffed with hair and pins and balls of dimpled wax.
“Alice, listen to me. There’s nothing there, all right? It’s a bird. Okay? A bird that got stuck in the flue.”
Alice’s head stops shaking but her eyes are still luminous and wide with fear. She draws her knees toward her, fingernails digging into her skin. I jut out my chin, defiant.
“There’s no witch. No curse. She’s a crossed wire in your brain, a delusion, that’s all. Okay?”
The scraping sound deepens, as if something is clawing through the brickwork. I can smell that rich, animal odor again, heady as incense. Paul is hammering on the door, his voice loud and strident. “Let me in, let me in.” I lift my voice, trying to keep it steady. I can’t let her see that I am afraid.
“It’s okay. Look at me. It’s okay, Alice.”
I’m trying to reassure her and yet I can’t bring myself to glance behind me in case the witch comes creeping from the hollow throat of the chimney, limbs bent and twisted, face tilted at an upside-down, inconceivable angle, smile slit so wide you can see her teeth all the way back to the molars with the stump of a tongue moving in the gory hole of her mouth. There is a rain of hard blows against the door so heavy that the wood bows inward. Alice’s eyes find me. She looks numb with fear.
“You’re going to die, Mina Ellis.”
Alice’s tongue is black and bloated and long. Her teeth chatter together beneath round, haunted eyes. Then the door bursts open and Paul stumbles into the room, his cheeks red and hectic, shirt damp with sweat. I have just a single moment of utter, terrible clarity— “my daddy sometimes thinks about taking his deboning knife to one of us kids” —and then his furious expression slides away, face paling. He, too, is looking over my shoulder.
“What the fuck is going on?” he bawls, fists clenched. He looks as though he could start a fight in an empty room. “What is that stuff?”
Something unlocks in me. My muscles, rigid and unmoving, suddenly loosen and I slowly turn around to see what they are both staring at behind me.
At first I think it is blood. The dark and viscous liquid oozing sluggishly through the brickwork of the chimney breast certainly appears to be blood. It trickles slowly to the lip of the fireplace where it gathers and swells and begins to drip onto the hearth beneath, forming a fat and glossy puddle of thick, black ichor.
“What is it?” I say, voice cracking slightly. “What’s happening?”
Alice is still sitting with her mouth hanging open. Paul looks as if his eyes might bulge out of his head. I take in the scene, the inky goo leaking through all the cracks and crevices like syrup— molasses, my tired brain supplies, it washed away the horses —and pattering to the tiled floor in large, coin-sized droplets. I crawl over the bed to where Alice, pale and shocked-looking, is staring at the black rivulets as they dribble down the brickwork. I put my arm around her the way Eddie used to do with me when we were kids and I’d had a nightmare, rocking her slightly back and forth, comfort in warmth, in a touch. In keeping the bad things at bay.