by Sara Faring
“A rare breed, but yes, a Yesi is flesh and blood,” she says. “Mostly.” She extends one hand: It’s pearly, even in the dark, and so tiny I know I could break its fingers. “Yesi is my name. Short for something impossibly bland, which I’d rather not reveal. I teach creative writing. I’m an author. Aspiring, if we’re getting technical. My book’s almost complete—”
Footsteps outside. My eyes bulge, and her mouth slides shut as she clicks off the flashlight. We are pitched in darkness.
The footsteps slow. An arctic draft flows through the cracks in the closet doorframe. The footsteps stop. My heartbeat quickens to an audible pace—Yesi’s, too. We wait, trying not to breathe. We are clasping hands, I realize—my left and her right. I urge my stomach not to make a noise; it graciously remains mute. The footsteps recede, by the grace of God. I’m exhaling, rising to my feet, when Yesi pulls me down again. She brings a single finger to her lips.
There comes a voice, so garbled as to seem inhuman. The sound is guttural, animal—the utterance of a creature with no human face at night, a black blur in the place of humanly protuberances. And I hear the clearing of a gullet. I clutch Yesi’s hand in mine, though it’s not much comfort, smooth and icy as it is. There’s the sound of cracking joints beyond the door, and a chill works its way up my neck with each pop. I wonder if the creature is devouring a rat, skeleton and all, or unfurling its own spine to its full size.
“Miss Quercia,” it speaks coolly. “Are you out of bed?”
I feel as if my lungs might burst from holding my breath.
“You must return to bed,” it continues, more crisply than before. I know it is the voice of Morency, but it sounds alien. I look over at Yesi, whose mouth has set into a thin line. What happens here at night? I want to ask her. But we remain silent. Morency raps fiercely on the door, and terror seizes my guts. Were it not for Yesi’s smooth hand—
“I will be forced, of course, to inform Madame De Vaccaro.”
The banality of this threat causes my shoulders to relax a hair, even as I hug my knees into my chest more tightly, even as I expect Morency to pull us from the closet and thwack my knuckles rosy with a ruler. See, though the supernatural is outside my realm of experience, the rule-abiding, administrative Morency can be managed. After all, from the logical perspective of a teacher, I can’t see what I’ve done that is so unforgivably wrong. I can’t. Rooms aren’t cells. Teachers, much less de facto heads of staff, are not monsters. But they are human, and they must be fed, and if they are deprived of food, they will sneak out in their highly unattractive pajamas. I bite my lip. Long seconds of silence pass. The closet door remains mercifully shut. We hear nothing more, except the embarrassing thump of my overactive heart. It seems that Morency incarnate has drifted off.
“Is she always this charming?” I whisper to Yesi, my hands still quivering.
“Oh, always.” She clicks on the flashlight and grins. “The true specter of Vaccaro School.”
“What happened to her?” I ask. “She sounded off. Wrong.”
“Wrong? Ol’ Morenc? The word cannot be applied to her. Per her.”
I’m not sure how to express my fear. After all, if Yesi won’t admit to finding Morency’s visit as unsettling as I did—mind you, I haven’t forgotten her death grip—then I don’t think I can explain it. And yet … “She sounded like she’d regressed back to some kind of demonic form,” I say. “On account of my low blood sugar.” I try for a smile.
“Ha. So what are you, by the way?” She pokes a finger at my coat. “Flesh and blood, or something more exciting?”
She’s skilled at shaking Morency off—cavalier, even. Enough so that I relax myself. That’s the calming effect of another’s presence, especially that of a champion at hiding fear. Those I know who hide their fear best do so because they’re trying to hide it from themselves, knowing it could corrupt some piece of them if acknowledged.
“I’m Mavi. English-language teacher. From Buenos Aires.”
“English!” she says, standing up between coats, pressing them aside. “Lucky you. I never learned. Not well, at least. You must be good to come here and teach the little ones.”
She offers me a hand. I pull myself up, used to the feel of her skin now, and open the closet door a few centimeters to peek through the crack. Emptiness. A milky glow fills the hall, as if emanating from a secret skylight. I shut it once more.
“I’ve been here my whole life. In Argentina, I mean. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t know anything at all,” she adds. “Beyond the stories from foreign books I’ve crammed into my brain. Fiction can seem more vivid than life sometimes, no? Fun fact about me—my memory’s awful, so don’t hate me if I forget what we’ve exchanged here tonight by the morning. My grandmother always tells me that jealous spirits must borrow my memories at night and forget to put them back. I’ve tried to write down every little bit of magic I’ve experienced in this house since I arrived to retrain myself, though. So far so bad.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh, only a few days.”
“First job?” I ask.
An impish smile forms on her face. “No, no, I’ve been teaching forever.”
She could be a teen herself. She could be lying about her age, like me. If I hadn’t heard her speak at length, I would have still believed as much. She watches the expression of doubt flitting over my face and chuckles.
“I started right out of school,” she explains. “I barely looked older than the girls I taught. Like you. You can imagine how that went over in Buenos Aires.” She waits a beat, eyes distant, as if recalling one of the memories she claims are so rare, before letting the flashlight drop from her face, illuminating a back corner of the closet. “I nearly bit off my lips to stop my eyes from tearing up in front of them. Baby monsters. I was weaker then, greener, as you can imagine, susceptible to fantasies of changing girls’ lives for the better with my overactive imagination. That same imagination made me an irresistible target.” I hear a chuckle. She’s wearing a mint child-size robe with pajamas dotted in pink clumps like roses underneath—another late-night sneaker. “The demon children dipped locks of my hair in red ink one day, hid a frog in my desk another. Poor thing. I didn’t find it until a month later, when the room stunk of old fish and I was thoroughly convinced I had some kind of unmentionable infection.” I can hear the vulnerability in her voice. For all her toughness, she also likes to overshare. But why? To rob these memories of their power? To come off as quirky and genuine and self-aware? Whatever it is, it makes me uncomfortable.
“But that can’t be why you left,” I say. “It’s BA.”
“No, no, of course not.” She chuckles and swings the flashlight back to herself. “You’re right. I came here for an adventure, of course.”
And she smiles at me, a small, genuine smile, the kind you give when you meet someone you’re 99 percent certain will be a great friend someday, so I feel inclined to smile back. She feels familiar to me now. She’s nice, as nice as can be, with her rainbow of sleepwear and her miniature hands and feet. And I’m desperate for a friend at Vaccaro School. Of course, I can’t help but wonder what secrets she’s hiding.
“So you like it here so far?” I ask as casually as I can manage.
“I do. Granted, classes haven’t begun. But I haven’t missed the city at all. Vaccaro School pulls you in and hugs you close. You must acclimatize to its quirks, of course. But in no time at all, you’ll embrace it back.” She brushes lint from her pale green lapel.
“To be honest, I’m glad for a fresh start.” I bite my lip.
“A fresh start?” She laughs again, a tinkling in my ear. “What exactly are you leaving behind?”
There begins the trail of crumbs, dropped carelessly for the amateur psychoanalyst to pick up. I could kick myself for falling into the oversharing trap. I hesitate a beat too long.
But she kindly waves it away and clicks off her flashlight. “Don’t answer that. It’s only that there’s
nothing fresh about Vaccaro School. It’s as old and gnarled and troubled as a place can get. Though I suppose it isn’t impossible. The family had their own fresh start, building the house onto a forgotten rock in the middle of nowhere, right? Just don’t let Morency catch you wandering again, or you’ll land yourself in hot water, then boiled to a nice lobster red.” She nudges past me in the pitch-darkness. “Let’s get out of here, all right?” She peeps her head out of the closet and pulls me after her.
That spooky crystal light filters through the hall, and the cold nips at my ears again. I raise the collar of my coat. “Boiling water sounds nice right about now.” My voice, hardly more than a whisper, carries down the long stone hallway. I drop it even lower. “You’ll have to share your Morency-avoidance techniques.”
“Gladly. First off, you need to take advantage of her anxiety toward the house and everyone inside—she’s as superstitious and suspicious as they come. When I asked her about the history of the house, she told me not to speak another word of its past on school premises. As if I’d summon a demon from its depths. And it took me three days to convince her I wasn’t here to seduce the paltry ranks of male staff after she caught me asking one hunchbacked kitchen worker for a cup of hot water. I think I’m well on my way to convincing her of my complete and total purity now, though. Just have one more potato sack to refashion into austere schoolmarm garb before I’ve a complete set for the semester.”
I can’t help but chuckle, even though I’m half-scared out of my wits that her rambling will call someone out of the recesses of the house. It is as silent as a church on the night of a fútbol match. Mention of male staff makes me want to ask about the man leaning out the window. But I refrain. “Yesi, why exactly don’t they want us to wander around the house at night?” I whisper.
“I’m not sure yet,” she replies. “I’m trying to figure out why, myself. It’s a bit spooky at night, I’ll give it that. But isn’t it kind of beautiful to experience primal fear? To feel your pulse quicken because a pile of well-laid stones catch shadows and carry sound in unusual ways? How often are we so bored and anesthetized by our routines—in our safe surroundings—that we lose all sense of what’s magical about our existence?”
I can’t say I’ve felt anesthetized by my routine as of late, but she looks at me and half grins, retying the robe’s amber sash. There’s a compulsive precision to her movements that I’m only noticing now; she fusses with the robe like it’s an outfit on a beloved first infant. “I know I sound a bit melodramatic. We are perfectly safe. But I was always curious about what it would be like to live in a haunted house, and this is the closest I’ll get. If you can survive living in a haunted house, I think, you can come to know all the oddest little nooks in yourself.”
A conclusion that would only spring to the mind of a writer. I, for one, have no plans to explore those dark nooks.
“So you do or don’t think the house is haunted?”
“It’s all in people’s heads, is what I mean. What we all fear is our perceptions being incorrect, even though they’re subjective, anyway—hallucinating, and so on. But I like to imagine that at least the family’s quarters are legitimately haunted. For the fun of it, if nothing else. The De Vaccaros. They do sound like an aristocratic vampire cult, don’t they?”
Yes. “We’re in the family’s quarters?” I rub my arms, sporting goose pimples I can feel beneath the pajamas and coat. I could’ve sworn I only wandered five minutes. I look around and see more stone hallways arcing out from the closet door, leading God knows where.
“Well, they’re just upstairs. But they’re all interconnected, the hill buildings,” she says. “Here’s the real horror-story fodder: The family almost died out here, sixty years ago.” She pauses for effect, pale eyes glittering. “And the staff were lost, too. I had to dig for this information because obviously no one would volunteer the details. Apparently, some sort of plague struck the household—bubonic, I heard, though the locals attributed the illnesses to territorial ghosts”—she rolls her eyes at me—“and rumor has it that only two members of the De Vaccaro family escaped in full health in 1918. Two! And no records tell how many perished, nor how many poor Indigenous locals went with them. That’s why she—Carmela, one of the pair’s descendants—had to hire most of us from the city. Because none of the locals would set foot here, even though it’s been decades.”
So Tío Adolfo was right. I try to make out some evidence of the family or its tragedy here. By my imperfect vision, we’re only in another old stone hallway, damp and empty. No wet bacterial splotches on the walls. No black mold. No five-fingered bloodstains. Perhaps the furniture in the ghostly ballroom holds traces of the unlucky people who once lived here, but they’ll stay slipcovered tonight. Every night, most likely. What happened sixty years before has no bearing on us now. And truth be told, next to Yesi, I feel removed from the tragedy. I feel titillated and warm and fuzzy inside, as if I’m bundled on a sofa watching a low-budget horror film.
But my stomach growls again, a hostile sound in the dark.
“If I don’t eat, I don’t think I’ll make it back up to my room,” I say.
She smiles again, this time with teeth—a neat row of Chiclets. “I know just the thing for that condition,” she says, taking my hand and leading me beyond. She bobs and weaves, looping around to the right and down a long corridor, until we reach a pantry, smelling of dried foods, and with both hands, she pulls open a nondescript drawer overfilled with jars and jars of cereals and cookies and candy.
“Meals are fantastic here, by the way,” she says, sliding out a tube of chocolate disks. “Morency will have them change the recipes to her favorite gruel if we let on how much we like everything, though, so don’t say a word. And don’t tell the girls about this secret reserve. It will be gone within the day.”
“Starvation or diabetes for me, looks like,” I say, shoving sweets into my pockets and into my mouth. They melt on my tongue. Pure ecstasy. How long has it been since I’ve eaten chocolate? “How are the girls? You’ve met them?”
“I’ve met them,” she says, placing a stack of chocolate disks on her tongue. “Mariella, Gisella, Diana, Luciana,” she lists, slurring as her mouth can barely close around the chocolate in her mouth, “Silvina, Michelle, Sara, Christina, Isabella…” She swallows. “Sweet girls. Truly. Of course, some of them can be a bit difficult at times—you’ll soon get to know Mariella, the ringleader—but they’re all bright. Special. You know.”
I don’t. But I smile back anyway.
“So few girls?” I had known I was teaching a small group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. But I had expected there to be other classes, other students. Looking around the empty halls now, I’m not sure why.
“Well, yes. It’s a pioneering class. Carmela must have explained as much. She views this semester as an experiment in teaching—to see if the Vaccaro School model is viable. If Vaccaro School can even be brought back to life. And if she fails, at least the girls will have a unique experience on their perfect résumés. Having the Vaccaro School pedigree used to be huge in international circles, apparently.” She raises a brow with a sly grin.
I watch Yesi’s pale curls bob as we walk and wonder if she’s as rootless as I am, as anxious to settle in. If she’s hiding, too. We cut through a large dining room with a bare rectangular table that resembles the chopped and shaped core of a poor thousand-year-old tree, and a patio, before arriving back in the first stone hallway. I smell the same fetidness from before. Perhaps there is something rotting in this house and I am too unobservant to notice yet—too foolish to trust my instincts. The rooms and halls are quiet, but we peek around each corner dutifully. Not a single sign of life. We hurry up the staff stairs, with Yesi drawing a finger to her lips when we pass room 1. She pauses in front of room 6, chocolate smeared across her chin. She dabs at the stain with a finger.
“This is me,” she whispers, pulling out a key.
“I’m seven,” I say. It almost seems
preordained.
“Yes, I thought so,” she says. “The empty spot at dinner, the locked room, and all.” She opens the door. Her room is far less barren than mine, and it’s painted baby blue. She’s also pinned a shimmery blue scarf to the wall—as if she cut a swatch out of the sky and created her own window. “I’m elated that I’m not sharing a bathroom with a swamp thing that only creeps out at night. Imagine the mess.”
“I’m still a swamp thing,” I say, pausing before my door. “I came by the admissions entrance this afternoon, and no one answered for hours. So I sort of fell asleep, covered in sweat and grime and who knows what else. That’s why I missed dinner, in case you thought I had a better reason.”
She frowns. “Nobody heard anything. It’s a soundproof maze in here, you’ll find. In any case, we’re the youngest by at least a decade, besides the chickies. Maybe that’s why none of the others heard. No excuse for myself, though.” She kicks off her slippers, prim little blue mules with bows I hadn’t noticed until now. “You’ll like the teachers, by the way. The others. Mole is the science teacher, and Lamb, the math teacher, and—”
“Those are their names?”
“Oh no,” she says, chuckling. “I gave them nicknames to keep them straight when I first arrived, and they stuck. Mole is the science teacher and resident nurse; she has glasses and a twitchy, pointy nose, and she’s a complete snoop but hilarious in her way, and Lamb—well, Lamb is the cutest little old man you’ve ever seen, with tufts of white fur on his head and the sweetest disposition, always rambling on about imaginary numbers—” She looks at me and seems to remember herself. “Well. Aren’t I just the embarrassing grandmother everyone’s ready to ship off to the old-age home?”
I smile back, belly full of sugar. I have to admit she is growing on me. Lightness and whimsy and charm: She’ll make the dreamiest partner in crime.
“I need to sleep before classes in the morning,” she says as we part ways. “Otherwise, I’ll feel like my brain is leaking out of my ears. But I think we’ll be fast friends, Swamp Thing.”