“One nurse claimed you put a hand on her shoulder and when she turned around, you were all the way over the other side of the room. They were afraid of you, Hazel. Afraid of what you’d brought into the hospital with you.”
“I don’t remember,” I murmur truthfully. Those first weeks at Belle Vue were a blur. Some nights I’d wake up in my small, bare room there, still able to smell the honey burning in the hives. Sweet, smoky.
“I first met you when I came in to change a broken light bulb. I think it was the second week. Two weeks you’d been there, and I’d had to change out the bulbs in that room seven times. It’s like you was burning the filaments out as quick as I could put ’em in. When I was coming down off the stepladder, I saw a shadow run across the wall that shouldn’t have been there. I asked you if you saw it. Do you remember what you said?”
“No.”
The last of my hair is falling away. I fight the urge to touch my head, to run my hand over the lumps and protrusions of bone under the skin. My scar throbs. I am so tired. I am so hungry.
“You said, ‘It’s my other sister running from the light.’ Now, Hazel, you laughed when you said it, but I didn’t laugh. I asked why your other sister would do a thing like that. You said she preferred to grow in the dark, like mushrooms.”
The clippers click off. Andrew swats at the feathers of hair on my shoulders, brushing them away from the nape of my neck. A cold breeze skims the top of my scalp as a blurred memory surfaces.
“Oh, Idoremember. We talked, didn’t we? About mushrooms. I told you about—”
“Devil’s fingers.” He nods. “You told me they were your white whale. I had to look up what that meant after. You even showed me your book, how you’d put notes in all the margins. It made it easy to write the words right where I needed you to see ’em. I just had to copy your handwriting. It isn’t hard. I used to have a real talent for it as a kid, if you can believe that.”
I stare at him in disbelief.Bray Farm, it had said, tucked into the corner beside the illustration of devil’s fingers. I thought it was my writing. It had looked like mine.
Andrew dusts the last of my hair away from my shoulders, still talking. “This is the problem with women like you, Hazel. You don’t question nothing. If you’d have really asked yourself, you’d have known you didn’t write those words. I watched you turning the pages of that book in the common room, your fingers moving over the pictures. I used to think you looked normal, and then I remembered that you’ve got something in your brain that shouldn’t be there. A spirit. A demon. A hundred years ago, somewhere like Belle Vue would have given you proper treatment. These days, it’s all medication and talking therapies. I’d like to tell ’em the problem isn’t with yourmouth, it’s what’s living in your head!” He gives a short, mean little laugh. “Got to treat it like an infection. Got to cut it open to let the poison out.”
“Talking of poison,” I tell him, sitting up a little straighter in my chair, “your sister needs a hospital. She’s going to lose that hand if you don’t see to it. Sepsis, gangrene. All sorts of horrible things could happen.”
“I’d rather cut it off myself than take her to one of those death mills,” Andrew sneers, inspecting a clutch of mushrooms that havestarted growing out of the wooden rafters that cross the room. They weren’t there this morning, I’m pretty sure. It’s my other sister. She’s growing. I don’t have long left.
“It may come to that. I mean it, Andrew. She needs antiseptic wipes. Bandages. At the very least, you need to splint her fingers so they heal right.”
“You going to make me another one of your lists?” He laughs nastily, but I can see he’s considering the consequences of leaving Maria to suffer.
“She’s in pain. She’s suffering. You want to help her, don’t you, Andrew?”
He scratches at his jaw. “You can do all that, can you? The splints and whatever?”
I shrug. No point being too cocky. “I’ll try.”
Andrew comes close. His breath brushes the top of my head like a stroking hand. The smell of him is bitter, like burned-out electrics. It makes me think of blackened circuit boards and frayed wires, overheated engines. I wonder if that’s what Diana smelled, at the end. Gulping mouthfuls of his scorched breath like a furnace on her skin.
He has a locked room upstairs which is all his own, my other sister had said, and oh God, I don’t think it will be long until I’m inside that room. This plan has to work. It has to.
33
The problem with this town, Cathy thinks as she studies the police sergeant sitting opposite her,is that everyone knows everybody else. Take Sergeant Jenkin. A year younger than him, Cathy has a vague memory of Neil at a house party in their late teens, drunk as a lord and walking around with his dick in his hand, leaning over the girls and saying,Suck it, just suck it. Do it for a friend.
“How you doing, Cathy?” He laces his fingers together over his desk.
Cathy swallows her discomfort. “I’m getting by. Thanks for seeing me, Neil.”
He winces almost imperceptibly, but she catches it. Should’ve stuck with Sergeant Jenkin. She notices the ring on his finger and wonders what kind of woman he married. How he treats her.Just suck it.Laughing at their disgust. She straightens up in her chair as he turns to the computer monitor on his right.
“This is about your sister. Hazel, right?”
“That’s right. I called last night, and they gave me a crime ref—”
“She’s younger than you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Married?”