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.
“Intowhat,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 lettershurts, 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 littleoff-centeris 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.