Chapter 34
alice was fighting with herself.
She could feel the talons on her shoulders, piercing through the fabric of her sweatshirt.
Her skin was ripping, giving way to the sharp-edged nails that had grown in secret for forty years.
Alice clenched her jaw and did not cry out, though she wanted to.
Her twin dug in deeper and pushed, and her strength made Alice’s knees buckle.
She fell to the grass, that creature on top of her.
Above her, holding her down, was this hate-filled entity with her own face.
Alice’s brain slowed, and she thought with startling clarity that this purple-tinged, grotesque woman looked exactly as Alice saw herself on those nights when she had lain, sleepless, on her bed, waiting for Jas to text.
On those mornings when she caught a flash of herself in the mirror as she exited the shower and hated what she saw.
Whenever Judy asked if Grant was dating someone pretty.
If she could have drawn a picture of how she saw herself at her worst, this figure—with the drooping skin and the cracked lips and ragged, straw hair—would be it.
And then, as Alice took a breath, readying herself to push back, the face flickered, like the frames of an old film, and it had her own face but whole and wrinkle-free, smooth as plastic, as if she had been made into a life-sized doll, completely symmetrical.
Her hair was sleek and glossy, with not one white strand, and her teeth, visible in her smiling mouth, were whiter than Alice thought possible.
If a perfect Alice existed, this was what she looked like.
She blinked and the demon was back, the screwdriver stuck in the damp, pulsing hole in her face. The tip of her tongue escaped her mouth and it sat there, flicking at her thin purple lips, waiting, it seemed, to unleash itself.
“You piece of shit,” Alice said, but her doppelg?nger did not reply, only paused for a second before reaching up and, wincing with a deep growl, slowly pulling out the screwdriver. She threw it into the dirt. Thick black liquid seeped out and dripped down onto Alice’s chin.
Time had never been so unreliable. Alice’s brain suddenly sped up as she felt her twin’s hands wrap around her neck.
The pressure was heavy, improbable, inhuman.
How could something so thin, so seemingly on the edge of splintering into a hundred pieces, feel like it was pressing every breath, every blood cell, out of Alice’s body?
The twin released her grip and Alice’s lungs filled with air, the inhale so painful that her legs and arms jerked and recoiled against the hard ground.
Stars burst in her peripheral vision, and she let out a series of coughs, ragged and sharp, grateful to be breathing even though it felt like knives scraping the insides of her lungs.
When she could finally breathe normally again, her twin was no longer on top of her.
Was she gone? Was Alice finally free of her?
She turned her head to the left. Nothing.
She turned her head to the right. There she was, standing in the garden but not alone.
She was holding Luna in her arms as if she were no heavier than a baby, a smug and triumphant smile on her thin grey lips.
Luna was unconscious, curled up in the twin’s arms, her head resting on her shoulder.
No, no, no, no, no. The whole of Alice’s body strained to get up, to rush over and rip her daughter from this demon’s hands, but she continued to lie there, trembling in the grass, her muscles quivering at the instinct to push, pull, and run.
Slowly, her twin walked over and gently laid Luna on the ground to Alice’s left, then picked up and moved Alice’s arm so that it was draped over her child’s body.
They could have been a mother and daughter asleep, innocently cuddling on a mild spring night.
But no. That’s not what this was. Alice felt tears streaming down her cheeks.
How could she protect Luna? What was she supposed to do?
Her twin lay down beside her on the grass, curled against Alice’s right side as if they were spooning, as if they loved each other. The three of them a family of sorts, a family Alice had never chosen or wanted.
She felt a hand cover her eyes, and she could no longer see her backyard, could only hear the faint sound of traffic on Kingsway, someone down the street rolling out their recycling bins.
She could feel the demon’s breath on her ear, damp and musty, not quite warm.
She could smell it, and it was like the mildew that collects in grout, in cracks between stones.
Alice shuddered, realizing that the sensation in her ear was, in fact, the creature’s long snaky tongue, its pointy end probing the lobe, the cartilage, and the inside, twisting around and around, as if trying to taste every millimetre of flesh.
Alice tried to scream but nothing came out, only breath.
She swore she could hear her twin speak— Shush now —but she knew she wasn’t making a sound.
Was she inserting the words into her ear somehow?
If only Alice could scream. Relax , the raw, gravelly voice said. Just give in.
Her eyes, rather than fighting to stay open underneath that cool dank hand, began to close.
It seemed easier to let its weight bring them down.
Alice felt herself descending, as if she were in an elevator with no lights, the only indication that she was moving downward the sinking in her stomach.
A light flashed and she saw Jas, spreading out a pile of colourful pamphlets about moving to Mexico.
She heard her own voice encouraging this outrageous plan, but was it her voice?
You understand now, don’t you? It was me who came up with the idea to run away to Mexico.
And then his beautiful face sleeping beside her as she stroked his slack cheek.
She heard Luna’s voice calling for her, that familiar night-terror panic in her voice, and Jas would not get dressed and leave, he was insisting that he stay, and Alice felt like tearing out her own hair because would someone, for once, just listen to what she wanted?
You remember how bad that felt. So do I. You forgot the rest. But I couldn’t.
Alice descended further, this time so quickly that she thought she might faint with dizziness. She tried to move, tried to sit up, but her twin’s hold over her eyes was tight, and the tongue was so heavy in her head, relentless, squirming. Another light flashed. And then another and another.
Grant shouting that she was a whore the night she told him she wanted a divorce.
Tom, dying or already dead, hanging off the edge of the bed, still warm as she stood in the doorway.
Judy, months later, in a business suit, her high heels still on her feet, crying in her bed in the middle of the day, choking on her tears.
A series of flashes, intense and fast, burned through Alice’s brain. She thought her head must be on fire, that flames must be angrily licking at the nerves and viscera inside her skull. Farther and farther she fell, and she wanted to scream, Someone catch me, please!
Suddenly, a younger version of her uncle Sam was hovering above her.
He was forcing his tongue into her mouth, his hands all over her.
Ah , said the same rough voice, you are Judy now .
He was pulling off her underwear, and she couldn’t push him away.
A moment later she was in a bathroom, clawing at the skin of her stomach, certain there was something evil and insistent growing inside.
Then she saw a small girl crouched in a corner, crowded with spiderwebs and clumps of grey dust, being pulled into the darkness by a pair of long shadowy hands.
Somehow Alice knew this child was Judy, and she felt her own hands reach forward and grab hold of little Judy, as if she were in a battle with a demon she could barely see.
She gave one last pull and Judy fell safely into her arms, but then she stood her up, wiped her tears away, and punched the child, the soft toddler flesh giving way so easily under the impact.
She punched Judy again and again, until her fists were numb and it no longer felt like a child’s body she was hurting, but something inanimate, unknowing.
Alice wanted to cry when she realized that she was seeing through the eyes of her grandmother.
Bette, who had grown up without a mother.
Bette, who didn’t know what parenting was.
Bette, who had terrorized her own daughter to make her hard and indestructible and immune to ghosts.
She saw a tall thin man with a black moustache in a white undershirt and dull brown pants.
He held a revolver to her head and forced her to kneel.
She had to take him in her mouth or he would shoot her, he said, but instead of terror she was hit with a wave of apathy, the kind of numbness that enabled survival.
She felt herself shrugging. Death would be better than this, so perhaps this soldier would kill her and she could finally be at peace.
She was Gigi, her great-grandmother, the origin story for them all.
And now she was in a garden, her baby in her arms, running and running away from a girl in a green dress, but she knew that she would be caught, that she would have to die in order for her baby to live on, even if all the trauma carried in every one of her cells, every nerve ending, every muscle fibre would persist inside her child for the rest of her life.
And then Alice saw her father again, and Jas, and Luca, all three falling with her, around her.
She tried to grab them, but they were just out of reach, maddeningly close and then distant again.
You can’t have them , the voice said. They are the ones you love too much and so they are mine.