“We choose how much power we give others over us, Alice. Right now, you’re handing over all the power to nothing more than broken glass and bad intentions. You think you’re not in control but you are, youare.”
Alice laughs. It is somehow both gentle and horribly mean.
“Sure, Mina. Okay.”
I draw level with her. The floorboard creaks slowly under my weight. Alice doesn’t look up at me as she speaks.
“You know one night, just after I got sick, I woke up and Tamsin was sitting here on the floor right about where we are now. Just sitting there smiling and looking up at the fireplace. I was half-asleep and I must have said something like, ‘What are you doing, it’s the middle of the night,’ and Tamsin whispered, ‘There’s a kitten stuck up in the chimney. Can you hear it?’
“And I could, Mina. I could! A tiny mewing like a little cat was trapped up there, sad and hungry.Poor little thing,I remember thinking, and then Tamsin started to move forward as if to reach out for it and that’s when I saw the witch’s black eye gleaming through the hole and I got out of bed pretty quick after that. I grabbed hold of Tamsin and I dragged her away from the fireplace. At the same time that mewing started to change. It began sounding like squealing, like a pig stuck in a trap.Urgh.Just thinking about it makes me feel cold all over. Tamsin started shouting ‘get off me’ and twisting her arm so fiercely I thought it might just snap. I think I still would’ve held on to her though, even if it had. Even if the bone had come through the skin I would’ve kept her away from that black hole and that horrible noise that didn’t sound like a kitten no more. You see, the witch, she was trying to draw Tamsin in, and if she did that I wouldn’t see my sister ever again.”
Alice looks over to the fireplace, her face waxy-looking and stricken with fear.
“I know you all think it’s pretending, like I’m a dumb little kid, but you can ask Tamsin, it happened. She was so mad at me she just about screamed the house down until everyone woke up and Mum come running in saying ‘what’s wrong what’s wrong’ and all I could tell her was the witch in the chimney wants to eat Tamsin. That’s about when Mum started crying. She said, ‘I can’t take much more of this, Alice, it has to stop.’ Like I was doing it on purpose.”
She stops and takes in a long, shaky breath. I think of Tamsin saying“I’m going to get a cat of my very own,”and the shoe in the grate, just waiting for Sam to reach for it. The bait, the lure. Gooseflesh creeps over my skin. I open my mouth to say something reassuring and that’s when my gaze drops into Alice’s lapand I see for the first time what she is holding. It’s my photograph, the one taken in Crete. I stare at it.
“Alice, where did you get that?”
She looks down at it with mild surprise.
“It’s him, isn’t it? Eddie. Your brother.”
“Have you been going through my things?”
I hear a strangled, gurgled laugh. I can’t be sure it came from Alice, not really. Her limbs draw closer to her chest, her eyes turned upward to look at me.
“She tells me things, you know. The witch. She tells me about how my daddy sometimes thinks about taking his deboning knife to one of us kids and opening up our ribs on the kitchen table. He thinks about thata lot.”
Alice’s lip curls, like a snarl. Her tongue slides along her teeth and my heart jolts. I reach toward her.
“Alice—”
“She told me about Maggie, Sam’s little girl. She told me about you, Mina. You and Eddie.”
I’m suddenly filled with an urge to scream. It balloons in my throat until I can’t breathe. Alice lifts the photo and holds it up to face me.
“I know about the pond with the bad ice in the middle, how it had looked rotted and sunken somehow. Like a bad tooth. It was winter and the trees didn’t have any leaves and there was snow on the ground. You don’t like going home anymore, do you? Because of that day. Because of what happened.”
Fear, fattening in the cave of my heart. I feel it now, crawling all over my skin, tightening my scalp. I want to put my hands over my ears just like she had. I want to be at home watching Oscar fold the newspaper along the creases with tedious precision. I want to crawl under the bed and hide.
“Have you been talking to someone about me?”
“Shetold me. She tells me everything.”
I feel breathless, rocked back on my feet. There is a buzzing sound, like a swarm of wasps, only it’s in my head, in myskull.Like they are nesting in there.
“My brother died a long time ago of pneumonia, Alice. There was nothing we could do.” I can feel myself growing anxious, it gnaws at me. “I didn’t know the ice was going to break. I thought it would hold!”
A beat. Alice’s tongue slips between her lips, just for a second. Black and glistening, a slug. Her voice is deeper, harsher.
“I know what you did,Meens.”
That’s what does it, hearing my brother’s nickname for me in her mouth. I stare at Alice, eyes flared wide, heart pounding in my chest. It feels like something inside me is working loose, blackened as a rotting tooth. She looks up at me from beneath the spikes of her lashes, her mouth stretched into a slick and queasy grin that shows too many teeth.
“Is that her?” I say quietly, bending down and leaning toward her. I make sure her gaze is fixed on me. “Is she in there, Alice? The witch?”
Alice doesn’t respond but there is a deep clicking sound from the back of her throat, insectile and frightening. She peels her lips back farther.