Maria is pulling something out of her mouth. It looks like black string, Cathy thinks, but then her brain seems to short-circuit, pulling back a memory of being a little girl and lifting her bedcovers to reveal a skein of dirty black hair curled up like a sleeping cat.
Maria retches and coughs, her eyes shiny mirrors pushing out of their sockets. A thin pendulum of drool depends from her lower lip.
It’s hair, Cathy thinks as her stomach gives a queasy somersault.Oh God, I think it’s hair.
Maria’s fingers keep working, digging deeper into her mouth, pulling out more hair in knots and snarls. Every time she gags, a little more comes out. Like cleaning out a drain, Cathy thinks.
Maria begins to gasp and make a thin whistling sound, hitching a breath. Suzie slaps her hard on her back, forcing another cough out of her. She spits, expelling a last clump of filthy wet hair into her cupped palm, about the size of a golf ball.
In the silence that follows, Cathy feels a sluggish dread sinking low in her stomach. She looks at Suzie, who is standing with her hands over her mouth as if she might be sick. Cathy thinks againof lifting the bedcover, the wet hair beneath, the smell of it, like drains and rotting fruit. She thinks of Hazel saying,I just need to do one thing, and she understands. It terrifies her.
“Oh my God.” She looks at Suzie. “I have to go back. I have to go back there right now!”
Cathy once said to me,If you can’t keep it under control, Hazel, then you don’t come around here anymore.We’d been arguing in her garden, the day I taught Danny how to make the stryker. Those words had come back to me the morning I’d called Cathy, just over a week ago. I’d asked her to bring the boys along, and she’d hesitated. I’d heard that hesitation louder than anything else she has ever shouted at me.
If you can’t keep it under control.
My other sister is never going to go away. She’ll just mutate, find new ways to apply her old tricks. It’s already started happening—look how much stronger she became the weaker I got. She’s a parasite, and now she’s found a way inside Maria. Pretty soon she’ll consume her. Then it’ll be Cathy, and then she’ll start spreading out like an inkblot, contaminating everything she touches. Danny, Suzie. My parents. Even little Scout.
But Icanstop her.
I find the keys to the shed on Andrew’s key chain, the one which hangs off his belt and jingles when he walks. He looks at me with his one good eye, and I try desperately not to look at the sickening hollow in his temple, the skin across it stretched taut as a drumskin.
“I told him not to drive,” he slurs. “But he just went and bought another bottle.”
He’s rambling, lips wet and drooping. I unhook the keys fromhis belt. A good caretaker, he’s neatly labeled them all—I’m almost amused to see that the key to the basement is labeledCELL—and I pull up the one markedGEN SHEDas I head out the door and into the dark, frosty night.
If you can’t keep it under control, Hazel, then you don’t come around here.
I’ve put a lot of people in danger. I haven’t been able to help it, because she is always there inside me, her voice a chasm I so willingly fall into. Joe had cried, turned away from me, sunlight falling over his freckled back.I can’t do this anymore, Hazel, he’d said, and I thought he meant he’d fallen out of love with me, but he hadn’t. Her voice was just too loud in my ear.
Outside, the air is so brittle I feel I could put my hand through it, like a thin sheet of ice. I cross the ground quickly, barely noticing the cold against my bare feet, even when the snow is up to my shins. When I reach the shed, I’m surprised to find that the door is already standing open and a thin layer of snow has blown inside. I bend down to inspect the lock. The hasp is now just hanging from a single hinge, the padlock lying a few feet away in a heap of twisted metal. It looks as if it has been clumsily beaten off, with a rock or a crowbar maybe. I think back to earlier this evening when I’d been tied to the chair, the sound of the drill building like the whine of a jet engine. The power had cut out only seconds after, almost as if someone had been outside, listening. Waiting for the right moment to turn off the generator.
Maria.
I can’t think about it. Acts of kindness are their own kind of cruelty—each one feels like a paper cut. I don’t deserve it. Easier to tell myself that by then, Maria had been inhabited by my other sister, whispering her insidious instructions into the girl’s ear. That’s why she broke into the shed and turned off the generator.
Two sides of the same monster.Twins.
I find what I’m looking for on the shelf beside the door. A row of petrol canisters, many of them already empty. The fifth one I pick up has liquid sloshing around inside. It’s about half-full, which’ll do. I don’t think I’ll need much.
I struggle to catch my breath as my head does another of those woozy 360-degree spins. I can’t wait here too long, however. I swiped the lighter from Cathy’s pocket when I hugged her earlier. I feel bad about it, but I’m hoping she’ll be a good distance away before she realizes it’s gone. Right now, my need is greater than hers.
I lurch my way across the snow, stepping in prints I’d made only a few minutes ago. Out here, with no light pollution, you can look up and see the wisps of a galaxy, far overhead. I bet the Bray Farm was beautiful once. Maybe once it’s burned down, they can rebuild. Exorcise all the demons.
I have to take another breather when I’m back in the house, bending over and waiting for the world to stop spinning. He drilled down to the bone, Cathy had said. Part of me wonders what it looks like. A glint of my skull under bloodied, torn flesh. It almost makes me glad there aren’t any mirrors in here.
“They didn’t put the strappers on. The strappers. The things that go across you.”
Andrew is still talking. Does he even realize I’ve been gone?
“Strappers?” I ask him. His good eye finds me, stares. The other is still off-kilter, looking away from the world as if sickened by it.
“You wear them. Safety.”
“Seat belts.”
“They didn’t put the beatselts on.”