Suzie nods, but there’s a strange feeling that’s been fermenting inside her ever since she’d taken that prom photo down off the wall. It wasn’t anything Hazel said yesterday that made her feel so uncomfortable—it had been the look on her face. Strained, almost as if she was in pain. Her eyes had been pouched and dark, and you could see the whites all around them. Big white eyes. She doesn’t mention this to Cathy, though—Cathy is worried enough.
Instead, Suzie simply fixes her with a confident smile and says, “So you know, maybe Hazel has a good reason not to be here today. Maybe she has problems of her own.”
“Huh.” Cathy snorts. “I doubt that.”
10
I’ve always hated these woods. As a little girl I was in and out of hospital, and after every visit I’d have dreams of the trees slipping their moorings and strangling the town, blind and silent as worms. Last night I had one of those dreams again. In it, the trees were pouring their roots into my throat until I choked. I wake clawing at my neck in the light of a pale and misty dawn. Outside, the circle of trees surrounding the farmhouse feels like a noose tightening, tightening.
Remembering those dreams reminds me of the sleepovers we’d have as young girls, all of us out to spook each other with scare stories: Bloody Mary and escaped maniacs with hooks for hands and, of course, Joseph Bray, the farmer who went mad one snowy winter and murdered his family in the barn.
“He used his woodchopping axe to do it. His sons and daughters went first,” Abigail had told us, wide-eyed in the dark. Her voice had been dripping with grisly relish. “He took his wife in last and impaled her to the wall with a pitchfork. After the thaw, the villagers trekked up to the farmhouse and found him sitting in the kitchen with his wife’s head in his lap.”
We had all leaned forward. The rustle of sleeping bags, thesmell of sugar and popcorn on our fingers. Suzie, her hands pressed over her ears so she couldn’t hear the ending.
“Joseph just kept right onstrokinghis wife’s hair, even as the blood from her severed neck was poolin’ round his feet.”
I don’t want to lie here thinking about Joseph Bray getting snowed in with his dead family, not here. Andrew might be back any minute now. I sit up on the mattress and rub the grit from my eyes. The little sleep I’d managed had been thin and restless and flooded with anxiety. The creaks and groans of the house settling had sounded like the timbers of an old sailing ship. I’d heard scratching in the walls and pattering footsteps that might have been rats running overhead. It had frightened me, and I’d curled into a ball under the thin blanket, hoping that daylight would come soon.
I find my fingers reaching for my back again, in the low spot a little to the right of my spine. There’s where the surgeon cut into me. The nurse had given me purple liquid in a plastic cup and told me it was like Ribena and it would make the pain go away, but it hadn’t tasted like Ribena. It had tasted like medicine, and I’d felt tricked. The surgeon had held his fingers up an inch apart and told me that the operation would leave only a small scar and that I’d barely feel it. Another trick. As I’d grown up, the scar seemed to grow with me, a twisted knot of shiny pink tissue that sometimes throbs beneath my fingertips. Just recently those hairs have started growing out of it. I’d first felt them in the shower, like grains of sand buried in the skin. Now they are long and stiff like wires.
They called it a teratoma. The percussive sound of the word had pleased me. A mouthful of syllables, like chewing a lump of fat.Tear-a-tome-a.It was a tumor, the surgeon had told my parents, sounding grave,but we don’t think it’s malignant. My mother had pressed a tissueagainst her mouth the same way she did when she was trying not to cry. My father had paled, lips pressed tightly together.She’s only five, he’d said, taking my mother’s hand and squeezing it. I remember it had been sunny and the chair I was sitting in was so big that my feet had swung inches above the floor. I didn’t know what a tumor was, or whatmalignantmeant. I just liked that one word I kept hearing.Tear-a-tome-a.It had rattled around my head like a bean in a cup.
Tear-a-tome-a.
I cram the last of the cereal bars into my mouth. I’m amazed at my appetite, considering my predicament. I feel like I haven’t been this hungry in weeks. I stretch and my joints crack, legs stiff. I wipe away the condensation on the window with my sleeve.Good morning, Diana.Outside, the clouds sag with unshed rain, the wind drawing dead leaves up into little eddying spirals. There are mushrooms growing here, along the rotted sill, small and snuff-brown with viscid caps. They’re funeral bells, a saprobic species that grows on decaying wood. If you were walking past, you wouldn’t notice them—they’re not showstoppers like the fairy-tale fly agaric or the cartoonish chicken of the woods. These are little brown mushrooms, common looking and unremarkable with a pale, thin stem. Behind me, I hear a soft sucking noise. I spin quickly around, convinced that Andrew will be standing there, but the cellar is empty. In the farthest corner, a shadow contracts, as if some thick ichor is seeping between the bricks.
More suction. There. Do you see it?
The voice is muffled, like listening to a television playing through a wall. I stare at that gnarl of shadow. I take a step toward it, even though my legs feel watery and weak.
Nurse, did it just move?
“I am a rational woman.” I say it out loud, even though I feel stupid, even as that swarm of shadow seems to tighten into a hard little knot. “I do not allow my imagination to play games with me. I am a rational wo—”
See the way the hair is knotted around the vertebrae? My God. Pass me the scalpel.
I stare into the dark. I feel frightened and exposed, as if my skin has been scraped back to the nerve endings. I stand so very still, heart drumming in my chest. I think of the scar tissue on my back and Abigail walking into the house on Beeker Street, flashing her grin at me, daisies threaded into her plaits. The three of us had been thick as thieves all the way through high school—Abigail, Suzie, and me. She’d taught us how to jump rope double Dutch and wore her hair in beaded box braids all the way down to her waist. We’d swap gum and gossip and lip gloss, our mouths always hot and sweet and sticky. Abigail had been brave—braver than me and Suzie combined, I used to think. She was the first one of us to get a boyfriend, the first to get her period, the first to learn how to ride a bike. We were best friends right up until that day on Beeker Street, the day of the fire.
The empty house on Beeker Street had been there as long as we could remember. It slumped by the side of the road like a dying dog; windows shattered, front yard overgrown with long, straggling weeds. It was said that the man who once lived there had lured in passing children with the promise of ice cream and drowned them in his bathtub. There was a sign on the door which readKEEP OUTPRIVATEPROPERTY, but that hadn’t stopped all the local kids since the seventies daring one another to run up and knock on the door. The old brass knocker was in the shape of a hand and it was said that if you knocked it six times, the door would open and the man would welcome you in, with a black ice cream cone in his hands and a big twisted smile on his face. One Halloween someone went up to one of the holes in the window and said they saw a child inside with their clothes all wet and their eyes all gone and Suzie had started crying and we had to go home. Abigail wasn’t frightened of the house on Beeker Street, however. She didn’t just go up and knock on the door. She went right on inside.
Does it feel pain?
The shadow in the upper corner seems to pulse like a living organism. It’s transfixing, like watching a snake slowly uncoil. I know this voice, I know what it’s doing. It’s a hospital simulation. Scalpels and suction and clean white lights.
They studied me. They incinerated me. They were afraid.
I wonder how it can know these things, this voice. How it remembers its own death. I raise my hand. I want to touch it. I want to put my hand inside that quivering darkness which smells like mudpools. I feel bile surge into my throat.
Rap!Rap!Rap!
The noise makes me jump. I turn and stagger backward, pushing against the nearest stone pillar for support. Andrew is at the little window on his knees, tapping his fingernail against the glass. He presses his face against it until his features flatten and deform;lips smeared like butter; eyes dragged downward to reveal the red rims of his lids. His tongue is a bloated pink leech. When he pulls away, the smudged impression of his face remains, a ghost against the glass. I brace myself. He is coming back into the house.
11
I need a weapon. Something stout, like a club or a rock. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Those big boots are stomping around overhead, traversing the unseen rooms and hallway above. I hear the rumble of his voice, and a deep bronchial cough. Desperate, I try to pull the wooden handrail free but succeed only in the near dislocation of my shoulder. I pick at the mortar between bricks in the hope I can pull one free. I’m panicking now. I don’t have enough time! He is whistling, the sound moving closer to the door at the top of the stairs. I consider smashing the window and using a shard of glass as a blade but it’s not sure enough and too liable to leave me injured—I don’t want to bleed out on a dirt floor beside a bucket of my own waste. That would really be tragic.
Now the padlock is rattling, and I have nothing with which to defend myself. Nothing.