“Hold still. I have to line up the hole.”
“Did you think she’d want to stay here with you forever? The monster who killed her mother? She knows what you are.”
He grabs my jaw hard, keeping my head steady as he positions the cap over my skull. There are two long plastic strips on either side of it, and he ties them beneath my chin. It has the added effect of holding my jaw closed, so he knots it good and tight, grunting slightly as he does so.
“You want me to tell you about my sister, Hazel? She was beautiful. An angel. Three years old and cute as a button, head-to-toe. She was a surprise baby, my parents already in their early forties. I was meant to be their one and done, but then Maria came along and everybody just about fell in love.”
He drapes an old, stiff towel around my shoulders.That’ll be to catch all the blood, I think. Panic swells in my throat.
“I used to give her piggyback rides round the garden. I was teaching her how to swim in the river. When she first learned to talk, she called meHan-drew, which made me laugh and laugh. It wasn’t her fault that my dad drove tired and still a little drunk from the night before. It wasn’t her fault the roads were icy and he was going too fast. When I heard she’d got out, I figured she was still alive. She had to be, right?”
His face is hard set and unreadable, like an alabaster statue. He picks up the drill and I experience a moment of vertigo, a sheer wall of terror rising in front of me like a monstrous wave as he walks back toward me. Close up, that drill is sleek and modern and absolutely terrifying. I can’t stop thinking of how it will sound going into bone. Grinding and splintering, bubbling.
“When I found her five days later, she looked like she was just sleeping. There was no blood. No gruesome injuries. She was just curled up under one of the big pines not far from here, like a fawn. I knew then that it was a sacred place.”
I can’t speak but I make a sound at the back of my throat. A strangled groan. I know where he means. After all, he’d taken me there himself, showed me the graves.
“She’d managed to walk nearly thirty miles, give or take. I don’t know how she did it, how long it took her. It broke my heart to think of her all the way out here at night, how frightened she must have been.”
He’s lifting the drill to my head, to the place beneath the hole in the cap where he has marked a cross on my shaved skin.
“I buried her there. She’s in the earth now, with the worms and the roots. Safe. Warm.”
He presses the metal tip to my head. I can feel it cold against my skin, the little indentation it makes there as he holds it steady. I can see his finger wrapping around the trigger and realize I am holding on to my breath, burning my lungs like a naked flame.
“When I came across the house and found that little girl here, something inside me just—it was like a light went on. Because now I could tell myself that Maria was alive after all. She survived. It felt like a miracle. Only, you and I both know that miracles don’t exist, don’t we, Hazel? Not out here, deep in the woods. Here, there is only the wild. Teeth and claws and carrion.”
I close my eyes, waiting for the crack of bone. I can hear Andrew’s soft, regular breath. I think of my other sister, standing in the snow with her mouth yawning open. I think of Cathy laughing in Central Park with a cigarette jutting out of her mouth. As the whirring begins, there is a sensation like a flashbulb popping in my head, and all the lights wink out.
40
The two women have been walking nearly forty minutes when they come across a scrubby clearing. It’s a relief after the boggy terrain they’ve been navigating, clambering across deadfall and ditches and mossy hummocks that rise out of the earth like the breaching backs of whales. Here, the trees grow in a broad circle, trunks gnarled and ancient. Their branches are thrust toward the sky in a way that makes Cathy think of old people with lined faces, throwing their hands up in the air in astonishment. The ground beneath has been shielded from the worst of the snow, but in places the earth has riven and cracked, opening fissures from which burst clumps of gray mushrooms. In the dark they look like foam, boiling out of the ground.
Suzie frowns. “It’s too cold for mushrooms, isn’t it?”
Cathy shrugs. “I don’t know, man, mushrooms do all kinds of freaky things. Hazel once told me they have a root network which means they can all talk to each other. They’re fucking weird.”
Suzie nods in agreement, although she can honestly say she’s never given them much thought before. Mushrooms of all kinds revolt her, all slippery and slimy and alien looking. In fact, this wholeplace is spooking her right now. Those fissures are suspiciously regular and straight, almost like furrows dug into the earth. But they can’t be furrows, she knows, because who is planting vegetables all the way out here? Flower beds, then, she tells herself, but she knows that isn’t right either. What she does know is that they are unnatural. She steps over one gingerly. Closer, the mushrooms are pointed arrowheads, black tipped. A warning.
“I want to go back, Cathy.”
Cathy is searching the edges of the grove, phone in hand. She exhales a silvery breath. “There’s a path here, see? The grass has all been flattened. It must lead somewhere.”
Suzie steps reluctantly forward and peers in the direction Cathy is pointing. Through a narrow gap between the sprawling beeches is what could be considered a crooked path, curving away from them into darkness.
“I think it looks like what you want it to look like.”
Cathy sighs loudly and dramatically, turning sharply to Suzie. “It’s too cold for passive aggression, sweetie. Just say what you mean.”
“I get it, Cathy. God knows I know how much you want to find your sister, but how long are we going to keep doing this? It’s nearly midnight. It’s cold. We haven’t found any sign of Hazel, or this house you’re so sure is just around the next corner. We need to call it a night.”
Cathy looks at her stonily. “Fine. You go back. I’m going to keep going.”
“You can’t go on your own.”
“Well, come the fuck on, then.”
Suzie watches as Cathy walks through the opening between the trees without looking back, feeling an angry heat spread over herskin. It climbs her neck, flourishes in her cheeks.It would serve her right if I didn’t follow her, she thinks angrily.Maybe I’ll stand up to her for a change. But Suzie doesn’t want to be alone out here either. Something about this dark little grotto with the fleshy mushrooms spewing out of the ground makes her feel sick and heady. It feels like the sort of place that if you stayed too long, you’d start hearing voices whisper your name from below the earth. So she hurries after Cathy, her heart pounding as she leaves the clearing behind.