Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  When Henry came, he took more than her name from me. This mirror image of myself. Her face is my face. Her eyes, my eyes. Between the two identical sisters, he chose her, and he wrapped her in soft words and hard fists. If the son of a bitch wasn’t already halfway to hell with worms crawling in and out of his eye sockets, I’d kill him myself.

  Lou has slipped the ring onto her finger, and she’s humming to herself. A song I remember from childhood. Something our mother would have sang while hanging the laundry or cutting potatoes. A song to distract yourself from the darkness snapping at your heels.

  “Let’s go. It’s getting late,” I say, and she pulls herself up. The hem of her dress is dirty, and there are two dark spots where her knees have pressed into the earth. She doesn’t speak as she walks beside me, but her fingertips trace again and again over the ring she wears. The more I look at the ring, the more it looks like the ring our mother kept in the top drawer of her dresser and never took out. “It was my grandmother’s. When she died, she told me to bury it somewhere out in the woods, deep under the roots of a tree if I could manage. Said that ring was full of the old magic; the kind she’d learned from her own father when she was a girl. The kind that she taught to me. Even after I did what she said, it always came back. Next day, I’d open up my drawer, and there it’d be. After awhile, I figured there was something inside of that ring that didn’t want to be lost,” she told us and left it at that. But there were nights when I would hear her in her room talking, and I would tiptoe to her room and press my ear to the door, but I never heard another voice responding to her.

  Every now and then Lou and I would wake in the morning to find the house empty, our mother vanished into the woods behind the house. She tried to teach us how to listen to the earth, how to watch the moon, but I was never interested, and I assumed that Lou wasn’t either. When my mother died, we buried her with that ring. The ring that I could swear is on my sister’s finger right now.

  The house is cold when we let ourselves in. The air pushes against me, and I tuck myself tighter into my coat. It’s been weeks since we had heat. My tips barely cover the mortgage and electricity, and Lou hasn’t worked since what happened to her.

  Outside, full night has fallen, and shadows leak into the living room from the two large windows at the front of the house. I pull the curtains, and my mother’s old words are in my ear. “Mind the dark now, Tessa. Like a mouth waiting to gobble down the soft bits it can find. Like men. When a man moves in the night, he’s full of the dark. Make sure you mind that, too.”

  A shiver creeps down my spine as Lou walks ahead of me. She flips each light switch she passes, but the rooms feel dark despite the dull glow.

  She’s still humming, and the sound makes my head hurt. “Could you stop?” I ask her.

  “Stop what?”

  “Humming like that. It’s annoying, and I’m getting a headache.”

  When she turns to face me, her scar is bright red. It looks raw and chafed as if she’s been raking her fingernails back and forth over the thickened skin. “I’m not humming.”

  I open my mouth to respond to her, but she opens her mouth, too. A perfect, pale circle covering her teeth, and I go quiet. I head for the kitchen and try to ignore the sound of my sister’s footsteps as she goes to her room and closes the door.

  I make a sandwich but don’t eat it. Lou’s voice hangs stagnant in the air. Whispers I can’t quite make out. A lilting, lullaby kind of voice. A voice that should sing children to sleep.

  I throw the sandwich in the trash and put my plate in the sink. Fiestaware. The only china my mother passed on to us when she died. For twelve years, it had been just me and Lou, and then Henry came, and everything changed.

  I fall asleep on the couch to the sound of my sister’s voice, and I dream I am washing her hair. Warm water cascades over my wrists, and the shampoo smells of apple. There is blood in the water. There is blood under her fingernails. I take her fingers into my mouth, and I wish, again, that I had been the one to do it. That I had been the one to push the knife deep inside Henry’s belly.

  When I wake up, it’s full dark, and the moon streams ghost light over the recliner and coffee table. Lou must have fallen asleep because the house has gone quiet. No more whisperings leaking into the air like smoke.

  It’s when I sit up, my back cracking, that I hear it again. My sister’s voice. Softer now. More distant. Coming from beneath the ground.

  I stand and gather my coat around me and shove my feet into my old black boots. The wind stings my cheeks when I open the door, and I stand on the top step. Waiting. Listening. Because I don’t want to go out into the yard. I don’t want to find out what it is she’s doing.

  “Lou,” I say and wince, remembering the way Henry said her name. “Louisa?”

  She doesn’t answer me, but I can hear her more clearly now. Syllables play tricks in the air, dip low and then rise and reverse back on themselves, so the words sound like another language. Something harsh and lyrical at the same time.

  I find her under the house. Tucked deep inside the crawlspace with her back bare and streaked with dirt. Muscles flex and shift around her ribcage, and I wonder when it was she got so thin? How I didn’t notice her frame growing lighter, the sockets of her eyes deeper?

  “What are you doing?” I shift from one foot to the other trying to keep myself warm, but the cold sleeps deep inside my bones.

  “I buried it in the dark places. He told me to forget it. That it had never happened, but I found where he’d put it.” She turns to me, extends her arms, and there’s what I think is blood on her hands, but when I look closer, it’s only the deep red of Georgia clay.

  “Buried what?” I say and swallow the oil slick feeling in my throat. I don’t think I want her to answer.

  “The baby,” she says and extends her right palm outward. A pill bug traces a path over her hand and up her arm, followed by two, then four more, and soon her arm disappears, the appendage nothing more than a part of the roiling dark.

  I blink, and her arm is smooth and pale once more. Tucked inside of her palm are a handful of milk teeth. I think of the baby that Henry killed, but it wouldn’t have had teeth yet. They shimmer like tiny pearls, and then she closes her fingers around them, and they’re gone.

  “Come inside,” I say and reach for her, but she shrinks away from me. Pulls her knees up into her chin.

  “Can’t. You saw what I found.”

  “Somebody dropped a ring, and you found it. It doesn’t mean anything, Lou,” I say and hate the fear in my voice. Hate that I’m thinking of my mother in that pine box, the ring winking from the dark as we pressed our lips to her cold forehead. I clear my throat, but it doesn’t keep my legs from shaking. I sink into the dirt.

  “The ground took so many things from me. I fed it blood, fed it my past, and now it’s giving back everything I’ve lost. Don’t you see?”

  “Come inside. It’s cold, and you’re tired. Come inside,” I tell her. Her shoulders slump, and she shifts herself onto her hands and crawls towards me. Obedient. Compliant.

  I scoot backward and we make our way out from beneath the house, and soon we are both on our backs in the grass staring up at a wide ribbon of black sky. Lou laces her fingers through mine, and our breath is full of ice and stains the air with puffs of white.

  I let the cold carry me down and down and down, imagine all of the shadowed things that move underneath, how they must carry our secrets long after our bodies have finished feeding them. Their pincers and tiny mouths filled with the skin and marrow of the man my sister imagined she loved.

  Lou sits up, and together with our hands still clasped, we make our way into the house. I don’t question her when she crawls into my bed, curls her body tight against mine the way she did when we were girls and the nights were long and freezing.

  I dream of the dirt, dream of bugs circling my bare flesh, tasting the salt and sweat of my skin. And then, I do not dr
eam at all.

  The light coming through the window is early morning gray, and the spot where my sister slept is empty. My nose is running, and my cheeks are chapped from the cold.

  A dream. A weird dream, I tell myself, but there is red clay smeared on the pale blue sheet, and I trace the streaks, the grit flaking against my fingers as I follow the marks.

  “Lou?” I call, but there’s no answer, and so I swing my legs over the edge of the mattress. Beneath my feet, there’s a small dusting of the red clay, and I dip the tip of my sock in it, trace my sister’s name and my name in the dirt. Stupid. Like a little girl with a crush and a notebook.

  Pictures line the hallway. Black and white imprints of a time when we were two girls with bare feet and wild, tangled hair. Lou waving from the very top of the pecan tree that fell two years back after a nasty storm. Me and Lou, our faces bloodied with the deep red insides of a ripe watermelon. Our mother holding each of us in her lap, her two girls caught tightly as she smiled clear and beautiful into the camera. Finally, a picture of my mother only, surrounded by long grass, her face and hands lifted to the sky. When we were young, Lou and I would ask her about it, ask her who took the picture and why she’d been standing in the middle of the grass like that and what was it she was looking at, but she would smile her secret smile and tell us sometimes there were things in this world that belonged only to yourself and those secrets were best left kept.

  “Is it the old magic?” I asked her once, and she pulled me onto her lap and hugged me tight.

  “Something like that, little one. I wish,” she began, but I was squirming down and running out the door, and I didn’t know what it was she had said. What it was that she had wished for me or my sister.

  Lou isn’t in the kitchen either, and I pull a glass from the cabinet, run the tap, and wait for the water to go clear. Outside the window, mist rolls across the ground, and a dark form bends to meet it, its arms filled with something I can’t quite make out. But I know the way it moves, know the posture. The gait. As I know myself. Know the skin I’ve inhabited all these years.

  The screen door slams behind me when I step onto the porch, and Lou glances up at me and then back down at the bundle she carries. Fabric. Something flimsy and airy. Something with lace. Something the pale color of a spring morning.

  I think she’ll turn away from me or she’ll run, but she lets the fabric tumble from her hands.

  “Do you remember, Tessa?”

  Clutched in her hands are two dresses. Identical scooped collars and skirts that flowered when we would balance on the back of the tiny heeled shoes our mother bought us and spin and spin until we thought we would be sick.

  “We were twelve,” I say, and she points to a tear on one of the dresses. The lace comes off easily in her hand when she tugs at it, and I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

  “This one was yours. Remember?”

  “Where did you find that?” My heart is pumping rabbit fast in my chest, and something deep in my gut aches.

  “I wanted to kill him. Wanted to turn him inside out for what he did to you, Tessa. But I was so small, and so were you. And then he ran away, packed up everything and left, and the police couldn’t find him, and you stopped talking for such a long time. Every night Momma came in the room and held your hand while you slept so that you would feel safe, but it didn’t keep you from waking up screaming. Remember?”

  “Stop it,” I say, and she shakes her head. Inside of the blurred motion, I can see the face of the little girl who followed Deacon Bishop into that empty Sunday School room, but it wasn’t my sister who went. It’s my face peeking out from behind the veil of dark hair. I scrub my fists against my eyes, and it’s only Lou’s face. Only Lou, her fingers full of thin fabric.

  “Didn’t you feel pretty when you wore it?” she says and offers the dress to me.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” I say and swat away the lace. It piles against the ground. A death shroud for all of the memories we’ve buried.

  Lou tips her head back and laughs, her voice climbing higher and higher until she’s screaming instead of laughing. The pill bugs are back, and they cover her hands like gloves.

  “I felt pretty the first time, too. The first time Henry put his teeth against my throat and told me to cry because he liked the sound. Even then,” Lou says and lifts her hands to her face. The insects creep along her skin, trace the outline of her scar—a singular line streaking up her face before disappearing into her hair.

  “You could feel it every time he opened me up. Couldn’t you? Sister. You choked and drowned on my tears, and you knew. Because I knew when Deacon Bishop took you into that little room. Felt it when he ripped you open, and oh God, Tessa,” she says. Her eyes are wet. I want to go to her, to smooth her hair back from her face, but I cannot move. “Could you feel it when the baby died? Could you feel it when I killed Henry?”

  My mouth is dry. I nod my head. When he took the knife from her, I knew. I could feel the pressure of his hands on her neck, could feel the anger pouring out of him, all darkness and red and heat, and I opened my mouth to scream, but my sister swallowed her sounds. Even when he drew the blade over her face, she stayed silent.

  “Help me. Help me find all that we’ve lost. Let it help us.”

  “Let what help us?”

  “Momma knew. She understood. About the things that move in the places where no one likes to look. She knew how darkness can leak into a person and stain them. She knew the places to hide, and she told me about them. You never wanted to listen, but I did. Before she died, I learned what I could.”

  My sister leans toward me and wraps fingers through my hair. She smells of mint, and I press into her, match my body to hers, the heat from our skin rising into the December air. When the pill bugs creep onto my arm, I flinch, try to pull away, but Lou holds me tight. So tight I think my bones will snap in two.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she says, and her voice is our mother’s voice. It is my voice. It’s Henry’s voice, and Deacon Bishop’s voice, and the morning sky goes pitch dark, and all around us is nothing but dirt for burial.

  When a police officer came looking for Henry, my sister served him coffee with hands that did not shake. He pretended to watch her mouth, but his eyes betrayed him. Instead, he watched that angry, wet slit in her face. Watched it pull and strain as she answered his questions; as she told him Henry had gotten drunk and they’d fought before he took off. No, she hadn’t heard from him. No, she didn’t know where he could have gone. Yes, she would be sure to call if she heard from him.

  He asked me questions, too. Asked if my sister and I shared the house. Yes. Henry hadn’t lived there but might as well have with how frequently he stayed the night. Asked if I’d been there when Henry came. No. I’d been at work. He nodded and pressed his lips together in a tight line.

  Before the officer left, he looked again at her scar. Made no attempts to conceal it as he reached out to touch her shoulder. “If he does come back, I’d put him in the dirt. But that’s me,” he said and then was gone. No one ever came back to the house after that.

  “I should have helped you bury him,” I say, and the insects cover my lips.

  “No,” she says and pulls me forward. “Come and see.”

  The pill bugs are in my mouth now, they pattern over my tongue and teeth, and I choke as they flood down my throat, move under skin and muscle.

  Stumbling, I follow my sister into the woods, her hands prodding and tugging me onward. “I can’t see anything,” I tell her, but she keeps moving.

  When she lets go of my hand, I pitch forward, my knees scraping against rocks or wood. I can’t tell which.

  “Help me,” she says and pushes my hand into the dirt. “Dig,” she says, and then her voice drops away, and I reach out for her, but there is nothing but cool air.

  “Lou?” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond. I say her name again and again until I am shrieking into nothingn
ess, but still my sister doesn’t answer. I flail, arms and legs pumping uselessly against the cold earth, but still I cannot find my sister’s body. Cannot find the heat in the space she occupied only moments before.

  When the bugs crawl up and over my calves, my thighs, I claw at my skin, try to brush them away, but they keep coming, faster and faster.

  “Don’t we deserve something beautiful?” Lou’s voice coming from beneath the ground, and I push my fingers into the earth and draw up handfuls, toss them to the side. Soon, my fingertips go raw from scratching at the dirt, but I ignore the burning and open up a hole in the earth beneath me.

  I find Henry’s body first. His face bloated and pale. Almost shimmering down there in the dark, and I uncover him bit by bit. The checkered shirt he wore, and Lou’s blood on his hands. I spit on his face once I’ve worked him free from the dirt.

  The bugs cover his hands, nibble at what’s left of the blood.

  It doesn’t make sense that he still looks like this. Like he’s only just been put to ground. I dip my fingers in the gash in his abdomen, and when I pull my hands away the blood is warm.

  Something vast has opened its mouth. Something that has long slept beneath our careful steps. I can feel it move, can feel it shifting below me in the safe place it created.

  The bugs circle against my cheek, their tiny legs scattering my tears, and I clench my hands against the dirt.

  “What am I looking for, Lou? Tell me what I’m looking for.”

  “Something beautiful,” she says again, and darker shadow appears to my right. It glistens, and then my sister’s face appears, the insects parting so I can see her eyes, her teeth.

  “Do you remember how they couldn’t tell us apart? Sometimes even Momma got us confused. But Henry always knew the difference. There were nights I wanted him to find you instead. Wished that just once he would get mixed up, but he never did. And now…” She points to her scar, traces her fingers over the seam Henry left on her.