Chapter 14
that noise again. pinky sat up in bed and pulled the curtain away from her bedroom window.
She could see the tail lights of a Nissan Leaf driving away from the house.
It’s Jas, of course. She had never understood the way Alice made decisions, the knots of preventable problems she was continually creating.
The first time they had met, Pinky was silent, nodding along to questions instead of answering them, because she could not stop running her eyes over Alice’s face—that beautiful, open, smooth face.
Pinky had seen beautiful women before and was often told that she herself was pretty, with her even skin and long eyelashes.
But Alice was different. Her face held a clarity, a kind of transparency that evoked a small, curious child, or a glass lake that reflected only the best parts of you back to yourself.
There was no doubt that men loved Alice; Pinky had seen men watching her whenever they had walked down the street together, even when they were dragging two small children along.
Alice had nothing but options, and yet she insisted on loving Jas and then pushing him away.
It was as if she had to throw a grenade into the perfection that was her life in order to feel something, to prove that she was still human, with a human beating heart.
“Rich lady drama,” Pinky muttered as she pulled the covers back up to her chin.
But then, the noise. She sat up again and put her hand to the drywall, the thin layer separating her bedroom from Alice’s workspace.
It was a crinkle, a muffled rumpling coming from the corner where Alice kept her boxes of diapers.
The layout of the house was for her a permanent memory, and she traced how the sound was travelling on her mental map.
Crumple, thump along the aisle of utility shelving, thump again. Repeat.
Jas had just left. Surely Alice wasn’t up working now, was she?
Pinky stuffed her feet into her plastic slippers and walked to the door that led to the laundry room and then the rest of the basement.
She opened it slowly, putting her weight into the hinges so they would not squeak.
The washer and dryer were as she had seen them earlier in the day: the basket, the detergent, the dryer sheets.
The pocket door that led into Alice’s office was half open, and Pinky slipped through, pulling her robe tighter around her body.
Only one light was on, the forty-watt bulb that hung from the ceiling. It illuminated only a circle underneath, but Pinky could see the objects at its edges. The worktable. The shelves. The teetering pile of boxes.
It was Alice, wrapping diapers in brown paper and dropping them with a thud into a box.
She moved with a marionette-like stiffness, her elbows and shoulders and neck turning in angled increments.
Each inch looked like a deliberate choice.
Weird , Pinky thought. Is she drunk again?
Just as she was about to call out, ask Alice what she was doing, she caught an odour.
Pinky sniffed. It was like the mouldy, coppery smell that emanated from the old pipes in the house, but there was another layer of rot, the smell of a pork roast that has gone rancid in the fridge, the smell of the slime that covers its surface as it decays.
Pinky gagged and covered her mouth and nose with her hand.
Was that Alice?
Pinky squinted. Alice seemed flattened somehow, as if she had been compressed by a vise intent on squeezing everything out of her.
Pinky shook her head and took a step closer.
No, she really did appear to be just a slash of a figure.
It must be the light , Pinky thought. But the smell. This couldn’t be real.
Alice turned to face the light, and Pinky stifled a gasp.
Her eyes were dark, shadowed by chaotic, overgrown lashes.
And in the middle of her face, where her nose should have been, was a gaping hole, the skin around its edges damp and uneven.
Was the hole pulsing, like a lonely, disembodied heart?
Alice reached up to the top of her head and pulled a wolf spider from her hair.
She squeezed it between her fingers until its body popped and her hand was covered in green ooze.
Then she opened her mouth and a long, thin, tubular tongue uncurled and licked the spider gore away.
As the tongue retreated, curling back into her open mouth, it lingered on the cavity where her nose should have been, probing the edges of its own flesh.
“What the fuck,” Pinky said, before she clamped her hand against her mouth. Shit, shit, shit .
Alice looked up and squinted in the light, head slowly swivelling left and right, searching for the voice.
As her face moved in and out of shadow, the gaping hole and the long tongue seemed to disappear, revealing the same Alice Pinky had always known.
I’m seeing things, I’m totally fucking seeing things .
Pinky stood as still as she could, grateful for the shadows and corners in the basement that Alice had never renovated.
She held her breath. She had to. Alice’s eyes scanned the room, passing over Pinky with no recognition.
She turned quickly, stepping out of the circle of light, and Pinky heard the sound of the tape gun, crackling in the quiet.
Pinky stepped backward, one foot at a time, as silently as possible, until she reached the pocket door.
She slipped through and pulled it shut, clicking the small lock into place.
It was plastic and could be opened on the other side, too, but it was better than nothing.
Then she hurried to the door to her suite and locked it shut.
She picked up her kitchen chair and fitted it under the knob.
Next, the two windows. Locked and locked. She shut the curtains.
Back in bed, she pulled the blankets up over her head and shivered in the tunnel she had made. Her lola’s voice bounced inside her head. Remember, darling, during the day, aswang can look like anyone. They only reveal their true selves at night .
Pinky took three deep breaths. This was ridiculous.
Alice was just Alice—kind of pathetic, self-involved, an alcoholic.
She knew Alice had not been happy lately.
Fuck, she knew more about Alice’s problems than she ever wanted to, if she was being honest with herself.
And every day she looked a little more ragged, a little more sharp, a little more brittle.
Pinky was so very tired of worrying about her, of worrying if the children were noticing her drinking, of worrying that Alice’s depression might lead to a tragedy nobody would recover from.
She balled her fists under the sheets and wished she could scream.
Why should she have to worry this much over a woman who wasn’t even her boss anymore?
Alice was not an aswang; she was a woman on the verge of ruin.
Pinky needed sleep to clear her head. The old stories from her past had been made visible through a trick of her own imagination, as if everything she had ever done—the escapes from family and lovers, the yearning for a wild freedom—was coming back to haunt her, using her lola’s most favourite cautionary tale.
It was a rebuke, made up by her brain because it was tired of the choices she had made, the selfish, self-serving ones.
Pinky told herself to stop looking into the shadows, to stop replaying her lola’s warnings and the bedtime stories that had been meant to control her.
She had left the aswang behind years and years ago, and she wasn’t going to let her brain trick her into believing otherwise now.
She turned in bed, pulling the blankets around her until she was wrapped up tight, and closed her eyes.