“You know what trepanation is, Hazel?”
His voice is a buzz saw but the word is familiar.Trepanation.It tastes old, ancient even. Torture. Cold stones stained with spilled blood. Andrew doesn’t wait for an answer. He snaps the clamshell closed.
“It’s an ancient practice. In fact, it’s the oldest surgical procedure known to humanity. In medicine, they thought it relievedpressure and stagnant blood, got the thoughts flowing. Others used it as a tool to purge evil spirits.”
Andrew walks across to the table and picks up a pair of latex gloves, the kind you see in hospitals. He begins to ease his fingers into them, glancing over at me.
“‘To oust the scourge of thinking-demons.’ Those were the words written on the notes of a Swedish patient in the sixteenth century. He survived the procedure, but many didn’t. Not back then. There were infections. Madness. Blood loss.”
He snaps the second glove on and lifts up a small swab. As he approaches, I find my voice, the words thick and heavy as tar.
“Andrew, I… I don’t have demons.”
“You do, Hazel. You do.”
Something cold and wet glides over my frontal bone, and I smell the distinct fragrance of antiseptic—bright and lemony and intensely clinical. I try to pull away but he puts his hand on the back of my neck. It’s intimate, skin-crawling.
“Your ‘other sister,’ you called her. They cut her out of you. You even showed me the scar, do you remember?”
I shake my head. I’m struggling to think clearly, can’t shake off the effects of that knockout drug he’d given me. I just know I have to escape. His eyes are flat and unfocused, pinprick pupils floating on dull golden coins.
“She was a figment. I had therapy. I’m all better now.”
Tcoh!Andrew clucks his tongue and gives me a disparaging look. “You think I didn’t read your patient notes? Haven’t heard you talking to yourself down there in the basement?” He leans closer, grinning, giving me a good view of that tooth gap. “You even had me fooled. I swear I couldsmellher sometimes, you know? Like the drains by the beach on a hot summer’s day.”
Andrew slides his hand into his pocket and pulls out a pen. It’s a thick marker, the type you’d see in a classroom. He draws a direct line with his finger from between my eyebrows to the dome of my skull and uses his teeth to snap the lid off the pen.
I feel the feather-touch of the nib in a shape I imagine to be a small cross.X marks the spot, I think grimly.
“Your stories fascinated me, Hazel. I started to dream about the surgeons cutting you open. In my dreams, you were full of light.” He runs his gloved hand over my scalp. The feel of it is repulsive, somehow both wet and powdery and smooth as eel skin. “It poured out of you like all the days of Christmas.”
“Andrew, please. Your sister is in trouble. She’s outside in the snow. Let me go and help her.”
“Now, I think you and I both know she isn’t my sister, Hazel. Let’s not pretend.” He is wandering back over to the covered table again. “The others never realized, but you did. You knew the instant you saw her.”
“Who is she?”
He lifts something up, and I think it is the clippers, but then I see the long extension cord running from it. It reminds me of a tattoo machine, cylindrical and shaped to fit a hand. Andrew uses another swab to wipe the end of it. There is a glimmer of metal.
My skin contracts, turns cold with gooseflesh. Horror is not the red of spilled blood or the black of midnight, but the filmy, filthy gray of dirty dishwater. Fog, rising. The strained light through thick cloud. The gray of brain matter, seeping sluggish through a gored hole in the cranium.
“Maria was living here. Her mother was a drunk and a drug addict. She’d broken in, her and her waster friends. They were squatters, nine of them. Off-grid hippies, looking for an alternativeway of living. By the time I found them, it was just Maria and her mother left. Kelly, her name was. She told me that the others hadn’t liked the place. It scared them. They felt ‘bad vibes’ here, Kelly said. Well. They were right about that. There’s something about this house that doesn’t play well with men’s minds.”
He lifts the machine to the light, inspecting it, and there’s that hard shimmer of metal again. There is a fine steel needle fitted to the end of it, at least four inches long. I am beginning to sweat.
“I did that little girl a favor. Isavedher.”
Andrew presses a switch, and there is a shrill whirring sound as the machine buzzes in his hands. It builds in pitch like an engine overheating. The lights flicker briefly overhead.
He smiles. “Back then I was younger, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was using a pedal-powered hand drill, if you can believe that. The point of the drill was so blunt that when the blood started flowing, I couldn’t get the teeth to grip the bone. It took me two hours to get through Kelly’s skull to the dura mater beneath. But don’t worry, Hazel. I’ve learned a lot since then.”
He adjusts something, then flicks the switch again. Now the whirring sounds quieter and smoother, like a dentist’s drill. Andrew nods in satisfaction and even smiles a little.
I clutch the arms of the chair, desperately trying to think of a way out of this. Alarm rears like a horse kicking me in the chest.
“You didn’t save Maria. You cursed her. She’s miserable out here, no one to talk to, no friends. Even plants need daylight, Andrew.”
He walks toward me, carrying something that looks like a bonnet, only made of plastic. A shower cap maybe, with a small hole cut in the center of the fabric.