She thinks for a moment, her hands folded across her chest.
“Are you recording this?” she asks me. I nod, pointing toward the Dictaphone.
“It’s just to help me remember the things we’re talking about. I can stop if you want.”
She doesn’t answer, just looks down at her painted toenails.
“Can you tell me about the dreams?”
Alice shakes her head miserably, drawing her knees a little closer toward her.
“Alice?”
“I can’t,” she says quietly.
“Why?”
Silence. The whirr of the tape. Alice looks up at me and whispers, “She watches me through the cracks in the bricks. She’s in there now. That’s why we can’t talk about this.”
I nod, trying to keep my voice neutral. I’m not afraid, not yet, but there is a spidery sensation creeping up my back.
“Who is ‘she,’ Alice?”
Alice doesn’t say a word. I try again.
“Is it the one you’ve talked about before? The witch with the upside-down face?”
“Yes,” she murmurs. “She lives up in the chimney.”
Alice stares straight ahead, her whole body practically vibrating with tension. I can feel the air thicken around us, dust motes shift into strange, twisting sigils.
“Your mother mentioned something to Sam about this. There was a wasp’s nest found up there, wasn’t there? Do you think that could have something to do with it?”
“I see her eyes in the holes.”
“In the dream?”
Alice licks her lips. The soft, muggy heat of the day is rising, the sunlight slicing through the gap in the curtains a sickly orange color, like sodium lights. Sweat beads my brow and rolls down my collar. I uncross my legs, suddenly aware of how fast my heart is beating in the notch of my throat.
All the time,she mouths. Something about the way she says it makes my skin turn cold. She lifts a finger and points to a spot just behind my head.Right there.
I turn my head so slowly I can hear the tendons in my neck creak. There is old, faded wallpaper peeling away from the chimney breast. In the places where the paper has peeled away, there are small black gaps between the brickwork. I lean closer, teeth clenched against the feeling that my racing heart mightjust burst out of my throat, palms tingling. I stare into the narrow space.
What will you do if something looks back at you, Mina?That voice again, panicky.If you see an eye gleaming in there in the dark?
“I don’t see anything,” I tell Alice, pulling away with some relief. “I think this is probably one of those things we can chalk up to your brain playing tricks on you. It happens more often than you’d think.”
Just then, the slightest sound, maybe just wind in the chimney, maybe a bird landing on the roof. I laugh uneasily but Alice doesn’t smile.
“Am I going mad, Mina? Are they going to take me up Bodmin?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the loony bin, only you don’t call it that no more. They call it St. Lawrence’s Community Hospital so it doesn’t frighten people. It means the same thing though. It’s where they lock up all the weirdos. Like me.”
St. Lawrence’s. Lisa had said her great-grandmother had been taken there, hadn’t she?
“Doyouthink you’re mad, Alice?”