“I only assumed your youngest slept in there because of the toys and the cot. Besides, it tells me in your housing record that you live with your two sons. Do you want me to show you?”
“It’s okay. I believe you.”
He’s wary. Unsure. She must look crazy, she thinks.
“Well, I should probably tell you I won’t be able to get that latch fixed today. I need to send off for a part. They built all these houses in the sixties, so most of the specialist parts you need to fix them aren’t readily available anymore. It’ll probably take another week. I’m sorry I can’t do more.”
Cathy feels herself relax a little. If it takes longer than a week, that means Andrew Garrison won’t be coming back to fix it, because he’ll be retired and spending all his time on the special project he spoke of. Knowing this makes her feel a little better, and she almost laughs at herself for being so dramatic.
“That’s fine, Andrew. Listen, I’m sorry if I seem a bit on edge. I’ve had a very stressful week.”
“Not a problem. I’ll make a note of it and put my report in.” He gives her a small smile. “And I’ll make sure you’re not waiting another five months this time.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing. I’d ask you to stay for that cup of tea, but I’ve just realized I’m all out of milk.”
Another lie, but she finds she doesn’t care if he reads it in her or not. She just wants to stop feeling like she’s lifted a rock to find a nest of bugs underneath; squirming, chittering bugs.
“No problem, Catherine. Let me grab my things and get out of your hair.”
She watches him walk down the few steps from her front door to the pavement, latching the gate carefully behind him. Cathy waits, convinced he will say something, some jarring little note of discord that she will play over and over in her head that night, but instead he simply turns toward her and lifts his hand, the sunlight turning his eyes golden.
20
The mind can turn on you in isolation. I know, because Joe had once told me about Canadian experiments in solitary confinement and the hallucinations they had produced: points of light which melted like wax tears; elongated frogs swimming into open, yawning mouths; plants with long, creeping roots on which they scuttled upright, walking like bipeds. He’d been particularly fascinated with the aural hallucinations which had begun after only a few hours of sensory deprivation: gunshots and music boxes and the sound of a phantom choir. He’d told me he often heard the drone of bees just before he fell asleep, lifting and falling like a tide.
I remind myself of this as a wintry dawn breaks on the fourth day of my confinement. I’m shivering beneath the blanket, noticing how my breath hangs in the air in a silvery plume when I see the dark shape floating in the corner. At first it looks like a long black coat hanging on a hook. Then it shifts, and dread slowly uncoils inside me. As my eyes adjust, I see that it resembles a huge knot of kelp, dark and tangled. But it’s not kelp, of course. It’s hair. A thick wiry clump of it, so long it reaches the floor where it pools like calligraphy scrawled with a fine nib.
I’ll start with your sister. She never liked me.
Acid burns in my chest.
“I am a rational woman,” I tell myself quietly, trying to ignore the shiver in my voice. “I do not allow my imagination to play games with me.”
She is floating toward me, long strands of hair brushing against the floor with a soft, whispery sound. A gurgling noise bubbles from the hollow of her throat, like a blocked drain. Is she laughing?
“I am a rational woman. I do not allow—”
I back away until I hit one of those pillars, pressing against it until I can feel the lines of brickwork pressing into my back.
Iam a rational woman. I am a black mass. I grow like a seed.
She is all the way to the ceiling now, her hair falling over me like vines. I imagine it choking me, threading into my nostrils and plugging my throat, boiling out of my mouth in coarse black strands. I’m panicking, unable to move. My breathing is fast and shallow, like a cornered animal.
He’s keeping you hungry. He did it to the others. Hunger makes you too weak to think straight, too weak to run.
I look up—I can’t help it, I’m afraidnotto look at her—and catch a glimpse of flesh within that nest of hair. A lumpy, pale knot that might be a face. Long, sinewy limbs that make me think of umbilical cords, intestines. I open my mouth to scream when anothersound catches me off guard. The rattle of the key in the cellar door. Andrew is home.
His footsteps slowly make their way down the stairs. He is whistling that flat, four-note melody between his teeth, cheeks flushed with the cold. I can smell the outside as if he is dragging it behind him—hoarfrost and diesel, dead leaves.
“Snow coming.” Andrew steps into the cellar, his eyes shifting this way and that. “I read it in the paper.” He looks around the room frowning, as if expecting to see something. It’s a feeling I know well.
My twin has disappeared the way she tends to when other people are around. I’ve seen her melt into dark corners or pour herself into plugholes like thick black tar. When I was a little girl, she used to crouch beneath my bed, poking her fingers into my back like knots and burls.
“Must be a problem with the septic tank. It smells like a beach when all the dead things have washed in down here.”
He holds something out to me.
At first I think it is a length of metal pipe, but when I look closer I realize it is a flask, the thermal kind. I hear the hollow slop of liquid inside as I take it carefully from him. My stomach growls noisily.