“Is it her? Is she here? Alice? You said she was here.”
Fear leeches all the saliva from my mouth because I see what he is about to do. Sam walks across the kitchen toward the door.The scratching is becoming more frantic and now the door seems to be bowing inward as if something of a great weight and force were pressing in on the other side of it. The wood groans under the pressure.
“Sam, that isn’t her, it’s not Maggie. Sam!”
He’s not listening. He is standing in front of the door with his T-shirt untucked and his hands opening and closing into fists.Her bones are a cage, rattling teeth in an empty, eyeless head, I think, and when I look at Alice her eyes have cleared, her face slack with shock.
“What’s happening, Mina?” she asks, in a voice that finally sounds like her own. “What’s all that noise?”
“Sam!” I jolt out of my seat, meaning to stop him but even now I can see his hand is reaching for the doorknob, his ghastly smile, caught in profile, painfully happy and relieved and earnest. He thinks it is his daughter, his Maggie. He thinks she has returned.
“Sam, don’t—”
Too late. He swings the door open. A silence descends like an axe falling, heavy as lead. I feel the abrupt sensation of a connection severed, the shock of it. Out there the hall is empty, sickly yellow sunlight slicing through the frosted glass in the front door. Sam is panting as if winded, his expression tortured. He switches around to look at Alice and spits as he talks, seemingly unable to restrain himself.
“Where is she, Alice? Where’s Maggie?”
Alice looks from me to Sam, her expression blank and uncomprehending. Overhead, the wasps toil against the light shade.
“Where’s my little girl?”
Sam’s voice breaks and he bows his head. My nerves are shot,my voice trembling as I ask, “Alice, hey. Hey, look at me. When you said ‘she’s here,’ who did you mean?”
“Her. The witch woman,” she whispers, barely audible. “She left her mark on the door.”
I stand up slowly, chair scraping over the floor. Sam lifts his head and pulls the door inward so the whole panel becomes visible. There is a moment of long, spun silence before Sam says very quietly, “Get the camera, Mina.”
I pull it from the tripod, holding it with both hands to keep it steady. The video camera is bulky and noisy, withPROPERTY OF THE WESTERN HERALDstamped on the casing. I fill the frame with the image of the outside of the kitchen door, brushing past Sam who is standing motionless, mouth hung slightly open in shock. I linger on the places where the paint has been gouged all the way down to the wood, the places where the panels have splintered and cracked. I think of those snarling, grinding sounds, and my whole body turns cold, skin raw with gooseflesh. Out here in the hallway that sweet smell of spoilage is rich and soupy. I turn the camera so that the whole door can be seen, motioning to Sam to step aside so I can capture it all. It’s that comet shape again, the one I saw burned into the rafter on Tanner’s Row and chalked on the pavement outside—the witch’s “mark” Bert had called it—and now here it is, rendered so large the long tail scrapes beyond the doorframe and into the wallpaper, ending about a foot down the hall. Some of the scratches are raked so deep the plasterboard is starting to peel away. I lower the camera, stunned into silence. Sam looks at me and I can’t read his expression. His face is pained, deeply lined. He looks like he’s just woken from a nightmare.
“I need to take a walk,” he says, not looking at me, not looking at Alice. “I need to get out of this house.”
TWENTY-ONE
Just after four I walk up to the green, my head spinning. I can’t stop thinking about the way it felt when Alice looked at me, as if my skin were flayed and my nerves exposed, how her gaze had substance, the texture of sand in an open wound. Alice, saying“the dead become transformed”and me wondering with softly growing horror what Eddie has become in his transformation. Some shade perhaps, with pinprick white eyes. Hands of ice and glass. I came here hoping to reach him somehow, to reassure myself he was not suffering, that he was not gone.“If there’s anything out there, I’ll come back and tell you, Meens,”he’d said.
Please don’t, Eddie,I think now.I don’t think I can bear it.
I reach the phone box and sift through the change in my purse, beginning to dial our home number before reconsideringand dialing the number for the laboratory instead. I wait while the call connects, gazing out over the green. In the late-afternoon light it looks dusky and soporific, the water of the large village pond gleaming like mercury. The tall reeds and rushes that surround it are brushed with pollen, giving it an almost misty aura.
“Baldhu, eight-nine-four,” a voice says in my ear. Female. My heart sinks a little.
“Hi! It’s—I’m looking for Mr. Simmons. Oscar. It’s his fiancée.”
I hear it. Just before her hand covers the mouthpiece, I hear it and I can picture it with such startling clarity that for a moment I am somewhere else entirely; Oscar’s small, modern lab with the sanitary surfaces and the bulky computers and the hooded white suits they wear which rustle as they walk. One word, softly spoken. Oscar’s voice.
“No.”
“I’m sorry, he’s unavailable,” the female voice tells me and I have to fight an urge to ask:Is he fucking you, Lucy?
“When will he be back?”
A brief pause. I imagine they are exchanging another glance, him signaling to her with his eyes, a wave of his hand. Then, “I believe he’s left for the day.”
I hang up. I don’t know what I’ll say otherwise and even though I’ve long suspected it, grown accustomed to it almost in a reflective, weary way, I am surprised to find my cheeks are wet with tears. I stand very still and hold my hand over my mouth, struggling to hold back a sob.“No,”he said and that was so evident, so final. I don’t need anything more.
“Mina!”
I turn reluctantly, swiping at my cheeks. It’s Fern, crossingthe grass toward where I am standing outside the phone box on the pavement, one hand on the door for support. Her smile fades as she gets closer and, by the time she reaches me, has been replaced by a soft expression of concern.