Cathy flips open the sugar canister, wondering what Suzie had meant about having something important to tell her. She hopes it is something they canuse. Everything so far has felt like a dead end. She yawns again, taking her coffee over to the back door. She sometimes likes to drink it outside first thing, before the rest of the house wakes up, when the light over the ridge is blue and foggy. She considers checking in on Scout—after all his room is right next door to the kitchen—but she very much wants a moment to herself. Cathy would never tell anyone this, but these early hours are a sacred time.
She only becomes aware of the sound of the television as she’s coming back into the house. A muted voice, a flickering blue light in the dark lounge just down the hall. A year or so prior, it wouldn’t have been unusual for Cathy to come downstairs and find the TV on and Danny asleep facedown on the sofa, but since she’d moved hisTV and PlayStation into his room, those long nights had stopped. Now she rarely sees Danny surface until after midday.
Cathy puts down her cup, crossing to the kitchen doorway and peering across the hall. The lounge door is open.
“Danny?”
In the sitting room, the curtains are drawn and the television is playing quietly. Not a cartoon or one of Danny’s ultraviolent computer games but the news, the rolling news, a never-ending feed of suffering. Cathy hates the news channel and rarely has it on. It makes her jumpy, hearing about everything happening all the time. The news anchor is reading out a story about a fire at a clothing factory in Delhi which has killed forty-three people. The pictures show grieving women covering their faces, scorched paintwork. Fire engines in cramped and crowded streets. Cathy pulls back the curtains and reaches for the remote, only then noticing her youngest son as she does so. Scout is lying on the sofa with a blanket pulled gently up to his chin. His face is peaceful, sooty eyelashes long against his cheeks. Cathy frowns.What’s he doing here?
“Scout?” She turns the television off. “Baby? How did you get out your room?”
Crouching beside him, Cathy reaches out a hand. Just before her fingertips brush his skin—so pale, he almost looks like a little waxwork—she has a dreadful premonition that he will be cold and lifeless.
“Scout? Honey?”
She brushes his hair gently back from his forehead. His skin is cool. When she peels back the blanket, Cathy notices he is no longer wearing his yellow sleep suit that she’d dressed him in before bed last night. He is only in a damp nappy and vest. For a long time shewatches the rise and fall of his chest as if to convince herself he isreallyhere, really alive. Inside her, an alarm is ringing.
“Scout?”
Cathy draws him to her and presses her lips to his crown. He smells like silty water, like copper pipes and rust. It reminds her of the smell that comes off Idless Lake on cool days. Danny was always wanting to go swimming up at the lake, but she’d never let him. Something about the idea of the water there being…infected, somehow. She worried the water would perforate his brain, sending him mad like the lead pipes did the Romans. These woods did funny things to people.
“Scout, wake up for me, honey.”
Anxiety cinches her throat. How the hell did he get out of his cot? The sides are still up because Scout is a restless sleeper, and she worries about him tumbling out at night. But there’s no way Scout could have climbed over the baby gate outside his room—it is too high. How did he get out of his sleep suit? She shifts the weight of him as his eyes flicker open, pupils black and swollen. He looks up at her, babbling in his lispy, childish voice. She kisses the soft curve of his cheek, feeling distracted and upset, a fear so deep it gnaws at her bones. She inhales his skin, trying to work out what feels so wrong. It’shim, she realizes. He smells wrong.
Normally Scout has a soft, biscuity aura like milk and rusks, like the buttery balm she rubs into his skin after bath time. Some mornings she would take him into her bed with a cup of coffee and just inhale the feathery hair on his crown, how familiar it was, part of her, part of him. This morning, sitting here in a place he has no business being, Scout smells bad. Sweat and damp and earth. She holds him at arm’s length, unease fastening and fattening on her like a leech. No bruises. No marks. Just that flush on his cheeks asif he’d come in from the cold and that strange, nagging feeling that something is off-kilter.
She checks the front door. It’s closed but not locked. These days it rarely is. Either Danny forgets a key or she has lost hers. Cathy always tells herself she has nothing worth breaking in for anyway, but as she holds her son tight to her chest and fights the urge to cry, she realizes that is not true, not true at all.
30
My teeth are chattering. I can’t seem to make them stop. I tell myself it is the cold; the snow has been falling all night. Drifts of it have backed up against the basement window, almost cutting off my view to the outside world. Almost overnight, clusters of inky-black mushrooms have sprouted on the sill and around the bricked-up fireplace. I don’t know what they are, and my book is upstairs in Maria’s room with the rest of my belongings. Memories of the previous night circle like water round a drain. Scout’s body, heavy in my arms. His lips, purple and bruised looking. Round glassy eyes so like marbles I almost expected them to roll right out of his head.
I thought he was dead.
I don’t remember getting back into the cellar. I’m lying on the damp mattress with a heaviness in my skull as if it weighs a hundred pounds. I can’t tell how long I’ve been out—with this gray, unchanging light, it could be dusk or morning or anywhere in between—and there is a sharp pain on my neck where the needle went in. I struggle to sit upright. It’s like moving through treacle. My vision swims, rising and falling like flotsam on a tide.I have sharp spokes of memory: pulling the hair spray from my pocket and flipping the lid with my thumb before lunging forward and spraying it directly into Andrew’s eyes. He’d screamed, high and shrill, dropping Scout as he reached for his face with clawed hands. Scout had slid beneath the surface as smooth and frictionless as oil, and I reached in for him before I’d even dropped the hair spray, saying his name over and over again in my panic. Barefoot, I’d taken off at a run, through the door and down the hallway while Andrew shouted incoherently at my retreat. Parts of this memory are blurred, like wet paint smeared with a thumb. Parts of it, however, are startlingly clear. Hyperreal. Scout, waterlogged in my arms. His eyes open, lips slack with shock. I will see that face forever, burned onto my retinas like the afterimage of an eclipse.
“Hazel? Hazel, can you hear me? Please come upstairs.”
Maria is tapping at the cellar door. Andrew had locked it before he left, just as I was swimming out of my strange, chemical sleep. I don’t know what had been in that hypodermic he’d stuck me with, but I can hazard a guess it was something else he’d stolen from Belle Vue. I recognize this woozy, fluffy sensation from my early days there, the cold taste of it in my throat. A mild sedative, they’d called it, just something to help you settle in. Like it was a martini.
“Can you hear me? Come and unlock the door. I’m frightened, Hazel. Please.”
I lie on the mattress with my hands folded over my chest. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to her, I just don’t want to move. The sedative has nailed me here. Besides, the farther away from her I am, the better. She’s in danger around me. Everyone is. I can’t contain my other sister anymore.Two parts of the same monster, she’d said,and she was right. After all, my hands are still stained with Maria’s blood.
I’d shoved open the door of Maria’s bedroom and headed straight for the huge wardrobe in the far corner, hauling the piles of clothes out so that I could clamber inside. I’d rubbed Scout’s back as he’d started taking muffled little gulping breaths, stripping him out of his soaking wet Babygro and wrapping him in a T-shirt I found in what was left of the pile beneath me. The wardrobe door was ajar, painting a strip of light on Scout’s pale face.
Give him to me.
My other sister’s muddy yellow eye had appeared in the gap. Her voice had been slippery, oily hands wrung together.
I’ll keep him warm.
Her mouth, opening as if it was on a hinge.
He’s my family too. Let me take care of him.
Her jaw widened, bigger and bigger and bigger, until it sagged to her chest. Inside, a cavern of raw flesh. Thick black gums, no teeth.