“For the ritual. Come.”
My stomach rumbles noisily, loud enough for him to hear. If he does, he doesn’t comment on it. He must know how hungry I am. It’s deliberate after all. Keep me weak, incapable. I’m thinking about food all the time now, even when I’m asleep. Dreaming of it: soft ice cream and strawberries scattered with gritty white sugar, hot buttered toast and hard, salted peanuts roasted in their skins. I’ve even started craving meat for the first time in years, slabs of it seared and roasted and wet against my teeth. My mouth fills with watery saliva.
“I can stand but I don’t know that I can walk. I haven’t eaten in days.”
“Of course you can walk, Hazel. You’ve been up and down these stairs like a house cat, talking to my sister. Whispering to her through the door. You think I don’t know these things? I found the gum wrappers. I know when she’s been up to something. So stand up or I’ll drag you up and I won’t be gentle about it. Or do I need to get the needle again?”
I shake my head, getting carefully to my feet and making my way over to the chair with wobbling steps. I don’t want to be injected with that stuff again. I can still taste it coating the back of my throat.
“Here.” He guides me into the seat so I am facing toward the mattress and the long window beyond. The snow pressed against the glass is the palest blue, lit from behind by the lowering sun. It must be late afternoon.
“Stay still. I’m quick. I’ve had a lot of practice.”
I hear the electric buzz of the clippers as he pulls up a handful of my hair and presses the blades against my scalp. The vibrations rattle my skull like stones in a tin can. I close my eyes as he begins talking and my hair falls past my shoulders in dark drifts.
“My sister thinks there is a monster down here. She said it speaks with a voice that sounds like yours. I thought she was lying, until I saw her hand.”
Bzzzz!Right beside my ear. I can feel loose hair tickling the underside of my jaw.
“Her poor skin looked like corned beef. Like she’d put her hand into a woodchipper. It frightened me, Hazel. Do you know why?”
The buzzing stops. He leans closer. His hot breath tickles my skin.
“Because if Maria is lying, that means she hurt her hand deliberately. How, I don’t know. Maybe she crushed it with a brick or slammed a door on it over and over while her bones broke.”
“Or?” I whisper.
“Or she’s telling the truth and thereisa monster down here.”
He starts the clippers again, using his hand to tilt my head to the side. I can feel it skimming the tops of my ears. There is a cold spot at the back, where the air hits my bare scalp.
“Do you see a monster, Andrew?”
I open my eyes and look at him. His features are dark, and very sunken. Skin like old linen stretched over his bones.
“I seeyou, Hazel. I see a woman who was abandoned at a private hospital by her husband because she was listening to a voice that wanted him dead. Not just listening either.Actingon it. I see a woman who frightened the Belle Vue nurses so much that they would only enter her room in pairs.”
My mouth drops open in surprise. “Is that true?”
“Word got round about you, Hazel. It isn’t meant to—Belle Vue bills itself as a discreet, private hospital—but it does. Hold still.”
Bzzzz!Louder now, running over my cranium from front to back. My head feels hollow, like a glass bauble.
“The cleaners were talking about it at first. They started finding mounds of long, greasy hair under your pillows, all tangled up like wire wool. At first they thought you were pulling it out yourself. The nurses wrote it on your records. Trichotillomania, it’s called.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I saw your files. It’s an expensive place, but the security is sloppy. Besides, a handyman can go anywhere. Half the time they don’t notice me.”
Andrew grabs my head to hold me still.
“It wasn’t just that the hair looked disgusting. It moved too, as if something was nesting inside it. After that, when they found these clumps it was categorized as hazardous waste. For a time, no one wanted to clean your room. They talked about getting hazmat suits.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I? What about the mushrooms that started growing under your mattress? Thick and black and spongy, big as dinner plates. No one had ever seen anything like it. It had to be incinerated after you left. Were the patients who complained about the noisescoming from your room in the night being ridiculous too? They said it sounded like pigs chewing through the walls.”
The sow savages her young in a state of high excitement, almost a frenzy, I think. My shorn scalp crawls with goose bumps.