The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  I stumble past Dr. Molina, who blushes and hurries along the burgundy hall, even though I don’t acknowledge her. I ogle my hands and remember for the thousandth time that I’m reincarnated as a six-foot-tall husky crossbred with a Milanese male model. I wonder how much he takes advantage of his effect on others. I don’t have access to his interior thoughts, I don’t think. I would be afraid to access them, if I’m being blunt. What if I came across terror, resistance, fear? What if I came across leftover sadism, and it flooded my synapses with something explosively bright and sweet I’ve never known?

  * * *

  I learn after trying to inhabit Dom sober that it’s easier to enter someone who’s under the influence of drugs or alcohol (oh, how infinitely pleased every sex ed teacher I’ve ever had would be to hear a dead seventeen-year-old confirm this). Happily, Dom goes to town on his stash every morning. Pros and cons: My silky-soft hair reeks of weed, but in general, my body relaxes, chill as can be.

  Sometimes it’s too loosened up. One day, heading down a short flight of stairs near the student hall, I bump an unattractive painting of a ship off the wall with my shoulder—the brief burn of pain comes. You’d think that since I’m not the permanent owner of this body, it’d be like dinging a car rental I’m not on the hook for. But it’s not—I feel a lightning bolt of entitlement, closely followed by a thundering fear of my own fragility. As for the heinous, vomit-worthy masterpiece, I consider whether to rehang it or dash off when Carmela—yes, the brood mare mama to Dom’s baby colt, Carmela—approaches me from down the stairs, clacking up the flight in her skin-colored heels, as I’m still clutching the frame guiltily.

  I shape my mouth into a smile and try to formulate, in my head, a gracious but short remark obsequious enough to appease a tiger mom, when—

  “What are you doing, you degenerate?” she hisses. Her eyes narrow to hatefulness; her tone cuts like I’m an underperforming peon at her cement company. “Make yourself useful and pray for your sister in your room. We shall have a serious problem if I find you in the girls’ corridor again.”

  In the girls’ corridor again? What the hell was Dom doing there before? Remembering the mentions in his file, I want to retch.

  The body—okay, me, but the body when it fails—drops the painting on the stairs with a thud and simultaneously misses a step with my foot, drop-kicking the frame in some incredible gymnastic display.

  It gives the distinct impression that I’ve blown off Carmela’s request (demand?) and attempted to boot a hole in her precious artwork.

  And I’m still strutting forward. Mic drop.

  “Damn you, Domenico,” she says to my back. “Don’t you dare cross my path again when you’re in one of these moods.”

  Ha! Muahaha! And I can’t help but smile (internally) at the fact that she didn’t notice the change, even though (or because) I behaved like an actual nutcase. I still vehemently believe that any change in mental state should be visible through the eyes, or through the posture, just as evil thirteen-year-olds can select, from a crowd, the most vulnerable of their peers through the widened eyes and hunched shoulders—that cry for invisibility. My eyes must read as glazed as ever for Carmela not to notice a difference in her precious son. Either that or Carmela’s outright ignoring the unsettling changes in her house. And my possession of Dom is only the tip of the iceberg.

  * * *

  I leave Dom each day in pain, feeling weaker than ever—unbelievably sore, but lacking the ability to build muscle, really an athlete’s hell. So each night, to sustain myself, I feed from Yesi right before the sun’s meant to come up, which feels like the most banal evil routine now. As I flit away from her room, I try to ignore the extremely physical red flags that crop up as the ice grows. With the passing of time, the house is becoming a hive of weird, hostile energy.

  Before, I would only hear the tail end of a sneer here, catch a glimpse of the shadow of a bear-man there. But now groans and bitter laughter reverberate through the house as soon as the sun sets.

  On a sick, self-punishing impulse, I edge past the girls’ rooms after I leave Yesi. I’ve never been at night.

  I’m in their hall when I feel a moistness in my fingertips.

  I hear stifled gasps.

  Slurping.

  I squeeze through a gap by a door, and that’s when I see them. Feel them, mostly.

  The frizzing shadows from my nightmares; those constellations of sooty jizz.

  The Others swarm the girls’ rooms. Too many to fit. Feeding in slobbering packs. Too many to stop, too many to discourage.

  I can’t bring myself to look at the girls. Easy prey.

  I’ve mostly ignored the girls during the day because they just giggle and flee when they cross my path. So it was easy to brush aside the bags under their eyes ripening to the color of a fresh bruise, their reactions slowing. The weird one—Sara—must be affected most of all. The one who has a cold.

  It makes sense that the girls would be targeted this way: The more vulnerable the subject, the easier she is to feed from. As if it’s any consolation, the Others don’t notice me in the middle of their slippery debauchery. But I can’t help but wonder what else they’re doing that I’ve been oblivious to while in Dom. Are they also possessing people in the house, as I am? Would I even notice a change in anyone’s behavior?

  * * *

  In the daytime, in total disregard of Carmela’s warning, I snoop around the unlocked rooms in the family’s quarters, the cottages, and the common areas in Dom. (Man hands! Convenient for opening jars, drawers, and so much more!) I eavesdrop in Dom. I also train daily to acquire new skills to unlock house secrets: I painstakingly practice picking locks, and I read in Dom. I never read much at all before, but you’d think I’m a regular bookworm because I devour every dusty, forgotten book in the house, landing on some compelling info about the Zapuche tribe, but mostly getting lost in footnotes more times daily than there are washboard rungs on Dom’s dumb abs.

  Per a book published in 1908 by an especially sensitive and passionate tribal historian, I learn that a Zapuche shaman did curse this spot in roughly 1708. She did it in hopes of protecting the tribal territory from pre–De Vaccaro European colonizers—by shredding the cosmic wall between the living and the dead with this curse, she thought she could enlist the aid of Zapuche spirits in their ongoing territorial fight. Surely the fiercest Zapuche warriors throughout time would not let their holy land be lost.

  Unfortunately, the tribal historian and the interviewed Zapuche elders agreed this curse backfired, to put it lightly. Hostile spirits of all kinds and from all ages flooded the land, from the moment that the curse was laid through the unforeseeable future.

  All just as Charon said.

  But then … there’s more.

  A sacrifice of a young girl—once per generation—was the only identified method of protecting the tribe (and every other inhabitant) from the unholy Otros, or Others. Each sacrificed girl would safeguard that generation until the next. This sacrificial ritual was continued until so few Zapuche remained in the area that those still here … stopped. The tribal historian claimed that according to the elders, Zapuche numbers in the region fell to near nothing by the second half of the 1800s, when Domenica De Vaccaro instituted her school.

  It’s the one fascinating tidbit I extract, and it sends adrenaline-laced shivers through me. Not just because learning about it provides a brutal context for my existence here, but because it aligns with those Zapuche bedtime stories Mama told me as a child—stories I thought sprung from her imagination alone.

  Every story began the same way.

  Have you heard the Zapuche legend of the girls? I hear Mama say, in layers of memories from years ago. I would shake my head every time, even though I’d heard the legend at least a hundred different nights. These were carefully woven stories from her own childhood, set in the Argentina she rarely revealed, and every glimpse was precious. In every generation, she would say, a young girl was sacrificed to the
Zapuche gods, in a great ceremony on a cliff beside the ice, to ensure the safety and peace of the tribe. She knew being sacrificed was a weighty honor, one she could only hope to live up to someday. Because, Angel, when the girl was sacrificed, she did not die—no, she lived on in a new form, removed from the tribe but gaining great powers. Becoming like a god herself. She could move clouds and ice. She could connect lost relatives. And most important, Angel, she could tell you the color of your soul. What follows is one of her adventures in Patagonia … And that’s how every story would start. They were bedtime stories rooted in truth, that truth being their common preface, pulled straight from legend.

  The girl possessed unfaltering, luminous kindness. She was ancient yet aware of every generation’s travails. She faced unimaginable loss and became only stronger—all of this after being thrown from these very cliffs.

  Could she actually exist?

  Maybe I’m here to find her.

  * * *

  One day, while I’m cruising the house for more books describing these girls, I barge into a sitting room with a deer head, finding Mavi by a fire. I rattle off a sad excuse for hello and hesitate as I scan the room, wondering if I should engage with her. And if I do, should I impersonate Dom? I’m so tempted to slip into that clichéd detached-asshole personality and see if it just clicks into place when I’m in this body. I prepare the words in my head: words that will cut and titillate in one stroke. I heard enough of them back in the day to know what could work, but I never felt the kind of unwavering, testosterone-fueled hubris you need to speak them.

  I sit, ready to go, when I notice the way her eyes catch on mine and stick, before moving slow as caramel over the rest of me. She bites her lip. So this is what it’s like, I think, feeling that burst of self-confidence that’s sharp and bright enough to distract me from its artificiality.

  She returns the next day, and the one after that, so I must do something right. But I have an IQ higher than a grapefruit on my good days, so I obviously wonder: Is she returning to the deer room because I’m a sparkling conversationalist or because of Dom’s scorching hotness (exhibit infinity: his twenty-four-pack, loosely skimming all his artfully cut shirts)? Does it matter? It’s hard to say. But I crave every afternoon with her: It’s addictive, being seen and heard this way. Like she’s fortunate to breathe the same air as I. It’s a drug so intoxicating that sometimes I lose track of who I’m meant to be.

  It’s after a couple of weeks together and a near-capture by Morency that Mavi and I make plans to meet after dark.

  “It’s a full moon tonight,” I mention offhand. “The view of the stars above the cascading ice will be mind-blowing.”

  “I suppose it’s not in the cards for me to witness that.” She hesitates. “My room doesn’t have much of a view.”

  And then I remember. Of course: Her room, room 7, is windowless.

  “We could meet later,” I offer, heat creeping into Dom’s cheeks. “In the dining room.” Neutral territory, in between us both.

  She raises a brow. “Are we not acquainted with the same Ms. Morency? There won’t be an armoire for me to hide in in every room we visit.”

  And I know it’s not fair of me, but I want more than this existence of sneaking around to dead, enclosed sitting room after sitting room with her. Of craving an accidental touch.

  “We can come up with a cover story if we’re caught,” I offer. “You can blame me.”

  “Oh, I’ll definitely blame you,” she replies, but with a quick nod of the head and flash of the eyes, she agrees.

  I head down to the dining room early, watching the stars twinkle through the glass of the French doors. Never in my life did I see a sky like this: precious gems on unrolled velvet.

  I hear footsteps behind me, and then the whisper, Dom.

  She’s there, behind me, grinning like a fool, cheeks flushed and brown eyes bright in the dark. She’s so close I could bridge the gap between us in less than a second. I can feel her breath.

  I take her hand and pull her out onto the patio, where it’s bracingly cold, but the entire sky spreads before us, the dreamy indigo blue of the galaxy in old movies. And the ice, it glows as if lit from within.

  “It’s magic,” she whispers. She shivers next to me, and I can’t tell if it’s from cold or awe.

  I search for the constellations I know, but I can’t find them. Maybe it’s a Southern Hemisphere thing. Still, there are explosively bright stars shimmering everywhere, enough to create our own.

  “Do you see the giant sleepy eyes?” she whispers, pointing just above the ice. “And the lit candle? And there, next to it, the house with the smokestack.”

  I nod, even though I can’t keep up. “I see a rose,” I say, tracing it with my finger.

  “Where?” she asks, leaning closer. She’s shivering harder, now, her teeth chattering.

  “Here,” I say, moving to take off my jacket and give it to her. I drape it over her shoulders, and my fingers graze her collarbones. She trembles and sets her hands over mine as if to adjust the jacket, but really keeping my hands there. I can feel her heartbeat through the place where our skin touches. I realize I’m holding my breath, and I pull her a half inch closer, settling my arms around her, her back to me as we stare up at the sky.

  “I see it,” she whispers. “The rose.”

  We’re silent for a long time as she melts deeper into me, and for the first time, with my bear arms around her, I feel as if I’m helping someone feel safe and secure—as if I’m capable of protecting her from all harm. I’ve never managed to feel that before. Even when I comforted Rob or Mama, I never felt confident I could protect them forever. After all, how can anyone feel confident about something that falls to chance more than effort or will? But something about this moment with Mavi—the hormones, my muscles, that addiction she feeds in me, whatever—gives me the mistaken impression that I could. And I never want to move.

  “Do you think they’re watching us?” she whispers.

  “Who?”

  She tucks her hair behind her ears. “The family we’ve lost.”

  I rub my hands together. My mouth becomes dry all of a sudden. This has taken a turn. “What made you think of that?”

  She shrugs. “It’s so vast out here. I can’t believe souls just … vanish once the bodies are gone.”

  I swallow hard and hope she doesn’t feel the uptick in my pulse. “So … where do you think the dead go? I mean their souls.” It spills out against my will, hot as bile.

  She inhales deep, scans the sky with her eyes. “I should probably say I think they become angels, watching us from their clouds in heaven. But that sounds … too easy.”

  I shiver, hearing my name from her mouth. “I read about Hindu reincarnation once. The soul is eternal, and it returns to a new physical body after each body’s death. In every cycle it learns something new.”

  “I like the sound of that. I think I’ll change my answer.”

  We’re silent for a while. “So you don’t believe in ghosts, then?” It comes out as a whisper. She as good as told me she didn’t believe in them in our very first conversation, so long ago now, but since then, she’s mentioned the “inexorable feeling of being watched” at night, which almost made my eyes bug out of my skull.

  “No. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  I swallow the knot of heat in my throat. “Wouldn’t you want to see your mother again?” All she’s said about her mother, the professor, is that she’s dead. Not disappeared—just dead.

  She stiffens, and I worry I’ve upset her. “Whether I would want to see her has no bearing on the existence of ghosts. I don’t believe her consciousness could make an appearance here expressly for me. That’s all.” She clears her throat. “A ghost—a ghost would not be the person we love.” And the reality of the situation dunks me in cold water again: I’m seeking connection in a place where it’s impossible.

  We’re silent for a long while, and she slowly relaxes again in my arms. “We
’re both here right now. I think—I think that’s what matters, Dom.”

  And I stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, she’s right.

  * * *

  It’s minutes before morning when I leave Dom to sleep—I’ve overstayed, and I’m sure he’ll sleep like the dead for the whole day, because possession wipes him out as much as it wipes me out. I miss him immediately. My second-rate crystal tissue feels flimsy, dispersible by a few gusts of wind.

  I’m slipping into a new self. A self that finds expression only through Dom’s form. Old human habits die hard: Sometimes I need his body now because it empowers me in a way my shapelessness in the Other Place never does.

  I fall up through a skylight and watch the ice, which expands greedily as the cold worsens. Before, I could have watched for hours, but a new claustrophobia poisons the beauty of the view for me now. I hate the ice and the inert yet smug inevitability of its growth, which seems at odds with everything I know about the natural world. This world is changing for the worse, day by day, when I want it to stay inert.

  As I flit back into the house and toward room 7, Others gush from the other girls’ rooms, spilling into the halls in their bacchanal. Their feasting is blind in its intensity—vapors shudder past like greedy alcoholic younger brothers hovering around a wedding’s open bar. They are too busy to notice me. I elbow my way past, and no one gives the slightest resistance.

  I squeeze inside Silvina’s room and find a gruesome scene: Others dripping from the headboards, tentacles made of shadow and light draped across the prone, shrimpy lumps in the beds. Silent, slippery torture. I hear either the suction of the feeding or the whimper of a girl or my own imagination turned perverted composer, and I can’t look or listen anymore without heaving.