“I’ll tell you something I noticed while I was in that bathroom, Maria. There’s a little window right over the sink that isn’t boarded up. I reckon I’m too big, but you?Youcould probably squeeze right through like toothpaste from a tube. Have you ever thought about it? You could escape from here. Get help.”
“I can’t.” Her voice is so quiet that at first I think I hear only the wind. “There’s bad things in the woods. It’s a haunted place.”
“Is that what he tells you? Because you’re safer with whatever’s out there than you are in here, let me tell you that. Have you forgotten that just a few hours ago he tried to drown my nephew? That he stuck me with a fucking needle and took Scout right out of my hands?” My voice is breaking up like an ice floe. I’m shaking so hard I can feel my bones vibrating. “A man who would do such a terrible thing is capable of anything, Maria, wouldn’t you agree?”
“He won’t hurt Scout. Not now. He’s promised to take him right on home.”
I sniff, rubbing at my face. I feel bruised and tender and Ikeep seeing Scout’s gleaming blue eyes looking at me with horrible vacancy.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t have much faith in what your brother says, Maria.”
“He will. You’ll see. I made a deal with him.”
I frown. “What sort of deal?”
A pause. I hear her sniff thickly. Her voice lowers. “Is she in there with you?”
I stare at the door with drugged, horrified fascination. I trace my finger along the old, knotted wood. I think I know the answer, but I’m compelled to ask the question anyway:
“Who do you mean?”
“The other one.”
I take this in, listening to the sleet ticking off the window below, the thin winter voice of the wind.The other one.
“No, Maria. It’s just me.”
“She sounds like you, only her voice is…” Maria tails off, thinking. “Wet. Like as if you got your throat cut.”
Of course she does, I think.She sounds like me because she’s part of me, Maria. She’s what you’d call a twin, except she never fully formed and when they cut her away, they left something behind, and it grew and grew until it became teratoid, a great and monstrous thing. The evil isn’t in the woods, Maria. It lives in the minds of men like your brother, like Joseph Bray. It lives just under the skin.
“I couldn’t see very well at first. It was dark, and the moon was in hiding. But I could hear her, saying my name with a voice that was like yours but not like yours at the same time. I looked around, and there she was, looking round the pillar. Her hair was all black and her face was saggy, like a stretched bag of skin.”
I glance behind me into the gloomy, stygian stairwell. My tongue sticks to the roof of my dry mouth.
“She was saying she had something special to show me. I heard a baby crying and that’s how I knew it must be a dream, because what’s a baby doing out here in the middle of the woods? The way I figured it was, if I was in a dream, then I was safe. So I didn’t scream, even when she came right up close to me and her eyes ran out of her head like melting candles.”
“Maria—”
“‘Would you like to see a cool trick?’ she asked me. Her mouth opened, and right there at the back, do you know what I saw?”
My voice, rattling with fear. Guilt. “What did you see?”
“Magic. My little blue rabbit. He had a bow tied around his neck of pink ribbon, just like he had on my third birthday, the morning of the pancakes. I don’t know how he could fit in there without choking her, but he did. He did. He was right at the back, and she told me to go ahead and get him. To put my hand in.”
I close my eyes. There are red pulses behind my eyelids, a sour taste in my mouth. I know what’s coming, but it’s so hard to hear, because it’s my fault, isn’t it? I brought her here.
Maria’s small, wavering voice continues. “I only hesitated when I heard you saying, ‘Please don’t hurt him.’ Do you remember? I do. You told my brother he would go to prison if he killed Scout, and that’s when I remembered the baby crying and thenthatgot me thinking about the photograph of your sister with her two boys, and I matched them both together like a pair of cards.”
“That’s very clever,” I tell her, meaning it. I can remember how I’d heard her start screaming from my hiding place in the wardrobe, Scout warm and snuffling against my shoulder. It had sounded like an old air raid siren, rising in pitch. I’d burst through the wardrobe at the same time as Andrew had dashed past the doorway, his eyes wide and white in the dark. He hadn’t even looked at us. He was calling Maria’s name, taking the stairs two at a time.
“I knew it was going to hurt,” Maria says now. Her voice is growing husky. “But I didn’t think about it too much, not right then. I just closed my eyes and put my hand into her mouth.”
“You did it deliberately?” I can’t quite believe what she’s telling me. I keep seeing the way her hand had looked, the fingers snapped and jutting at strange angles, torn nails ripped from their beds. It had been a scarecrow hand, ghost-white and bloodless.
“Part of me didn’t. Part of me still thought it was just a dream. Another part really thought I was getting my old toy back. But mostly I knew she was going to bite, and that even though she has no teeth, I knew it was going tohurtlike hell. I heard the sounds of my own bones breaking in her mouth, and the pain was hot, like putting my hand into a fire and holding it there. I screamed then. I screamed not just ’cause it hurt but because I knew my brother would come running.”
I draw a short breath. I’m stunned. I try to think if I would do something like that, something so brave in the face of so much fear. I don’t think I would. I tell myself it is simply being rational, the wellspring of adult reasoning, but I know that it isn’t. When I’d burst into the cellar, not far behind Andrew who was already on his knees in front of his little sister, Maria was no longer screaming. Her mouth had been moving, but by then it was soundless, as if all the air had been sucked out of her. Her eyes had been circles sketched onto a face the color of milk. Andrew had kept asking,What happened? What happened?over and over again as Maria had held her bloodied hand up in front of her, the fingers bent and broken, looking for all the world as if it had been through a mangler. She had lifted her stricken eyes not to me but to the far corner of the room, where my other sister was already dissipating. A great carnivorous abyss, falling into shadow.