The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

His footsteps fade. I rub my hands together through the canvas-cotton, gray in the dark. I don’t want to be left behind. The hall looks so different at night—hostile and shadowed. A draft ruffles the hairs at the base of my neck, and I startle.

  I peek around the corner and don’t see him. Don’t see him, because there are more bends, more curves, as if this is an organic structure, the gut of a centipede. I run forward, stumbling on my feet. How is it that I am still feeling the brandy in my veins hours later? I’m so sluggish, yet so chilled.

  “Wait,” I whisper with more urgency. The hallway is too dark and narrow, compressing me. I hurl myself into a bend, but when I lose sight of my own hands in the dark, I slow. He left me alone. He can’t have, but he did. I curse myself and flip the collar up on my coat. I step forward—

  It’s then that I feel them. A damp gust strikes and melts into my flesh; an electrical charge trickles closely behind. I shudder with revulsion, unable to control myself. Intrusive, overwhelming, knee-weakening. A wave of icy nausea guts me. I curl over and wait for the sensation to pass. But it doesn’t. It intensifies, as does this feeling of weighty doom, humming through my upper jaw, hitting the lower like dripping acid. And strengthening behind me, exuded from the cracks in the old charcoal paint like a foul smell, are those old voices. Whispering at first, then guttural, they clash into a building screech of long, dirty nails on a chalkboard. I drop to my knees, unable to take in a breath, as my ribs won’t unknit. Another electrical gust sweeps through me, its darted charge like hundreds of fishhooks. I’ve lost all sense of direction, all bearing. I could be floating in air were there not so much pressure on my ribs.

  Something hooks beneath my shoulders and drags me onto my feet like a puppet. My brain, woozy from the brandy, can’t be sure if it’s me or another force guiding me. From that tidy cabinet in my mind emerges an overwhelming fear, a rangy, athletic fear. But in the same moment, an all-encompassing force corrals the fear behind a door, shutting the door, smoothing over the door: apathy. It maneuvers me, gathering its energy from the impossible tightness in my chest. A sign of impending death, perhaps, but I’m being walked and watched even as I deteriorate inside, succumbing to that tightness.

  A pincer seizes me by the arm. A firm appendage with the feel of a cool rubber glove claps over my mouth. I can’t take in breaths anymore. Any clear vision remaining narrows to an uneven, dime-size spot. I’m dragged out of the hall, down another passage. Helpless, hopeless, I screw my eyes up into the darkness.

  And there, an oculus. Pale blue, full of hope. “What’s wrong?” is whispered, the voice a distant rush. “Are you okay?” Familiar. I can’t shake my head. I’m rooted in place. “Do you want to go back?” The blue eyes are Dom’s. Dom’s. He takes me in his arms, placing two soft hands on my face, and I feel another series of pops through my joints, another jolt. The tightness abates. I fall limp, loose in my bones again. Dom props me up and brushes the hair from my forehead. “What happened to you?”

  The feeling of relief overwhelms—the return of control. I’m flooded by gratefulness and fear and sadness … And I don’t know what I’m thinking, but with his face—angles eased—a few centimeters away, I fall into him, and in that moment, I’m so eager to prove he’s real. A hot tide inside me swells up as I look into his pale eyes, and I move closer and closer still, until I can feel his breath on me, sweet as apple.

  I press my mouth to his: That same delicious current startles me, but instead of flinching back, I melt into the softness of his lips, that sensual reminder that we’re both present and human and sane and not alone.

  He falls back, wine-red mouth agape.

  “I’m sorry. I…” I trail off before he can say a word. He trembles before me, and I wish I could reach for him, but I feel an odd looseness inside my head now, as if something broke off and rattles around there.

  “It’s okay,” he says, bringing me close. I can feel his heart, this strangely precious living gift between us. “You’re drunk, Mav. I can’t believe I didn’t notice.”

  Drunk. It feels like an insult of that moment, and my relief drains away, leaving only humiliation and panic. I push to my feet, falling again because of the weakness in my legs. “I’m not drunk.” But I am, and I want to cry, because my words are so thick with emotion, and that makes me feel even more like a fool. Instead, I walk from him, gathering myself.

  When I glance back, his face is a mask of confusion, mirroring what I feel. I have only one certainty now: This was not the fault of the brandy.

  I have met them at last.

  Pain made them real.

  The Others.

  I hear footsteps again somewhere—soft and rasping, like those before. And though I now know I have no hope of hearing the Others move through the house, much less identifying them in the light, I slow, almost unconsciously, until I hear Dom’s own footsteps behind me.

  18

  ANGEL: 2020–1800

  It’s inhuman. Gruesome.

  In front of my eyes, Mavi tenses, becoming as rigid as a frozen steak, one of those cardboardy brown bricks hand-carried to your door in a branded cooler by a dowdy, sweating salesman. And after she gasps back to life, she crackles like that same piece of tough meat dropped onto an overheated grill. Watching her endure the life cycle of an Argentine’s favorite food is enough to make me vomit.

  Is that possession, the process I submit Dom to daily?

  It looks belligerent. Barbaric.

  Unlike Dom, Mavi frees herself from the state with relative ease. But I can’t forget the dead look in her eyes before her release. I can’t forget her abnormal surge of gratefulness afterward, as if I’ve done her a great service by existing beside her.

  And I can’t forget the kiss, an automatic motion that seemed to swell out of the spot between her collarbones, toward me. As if she couldn’t help herself.

  She’s supposed to fall in love with the son, I hear Charon say. Get her heart broken … She’s just that kind of girl. You know girls like her. We all know girls like her.

  Is she doing what she’s always been meant to do? Trip and tumble into a stale love story with a beautiful fleshy meatbag heir, the only potential impediment being his dislike of her? The personality inside of him otherwise not mattering at all?

  I don’t believe it. But her hot and wounded eyes—so desperate to justify very real emotion, after I tell her she’s drunk—they also linger in my memory.

  * * *

  “I’m not drunk,” Mama said that afternoon, which meant she was. And she was almost never drunk. I followed her as she stomped into the bathroom, reeking of white wine, and upended a plastic container under the sink, dumping all her cosmetics onto the ground. “Come hang, Angel.”

  I looked at the assortment of mini-lipsticks and eyeliners strewn on the tile like they might rear up and bite me. “Aren’t you supposed to be saving the world today?”

  She’d volunteered for a laundry list of human rights organizations in her spare time, and she’d been encouraging me to join her for ages.

  “Moved to tomorrow.”

  Which was never good, coming from the woman who almost tattooed tempus fugit, carpe diem to the bottom of her foot.

  “You’re going to have to organize all this shit,” I said.

  “Exactly what I’m doing,” she said, patting the rug. “Come on. Sit.”

  I sat cross-legged in front of her: She looked especially thin and girlish on the floor before me. The weight had been melting off her slender frame recently, because of work, I thought. I could’ve easily encircled her wrist with my hand.

  An eye shadow slipped through her fingers, and I looked up, catching her eyes just glowing at me.

  “My precious Angel. I love you so much,” she said, cupping my acne-flecked cheeks in both hands.

  “Mama, stop,” I groaned, throwing her from me. That was Mama. She could always find beauty when it wasn’t there.

  “Fine,” she said. “Be that way.” She sifted through the lipst
icks. She wiggled one, a light apricot. “Oooh. Blushing apricot. 253, 213, 177. Nice. Reminds me of your favorite blanket back in the day. The one with the stars.” She sighed, with a dreamy grin on her face, and uncapped the lipstick. “Do you still have that beat-up little scrap of it somewhere, like you used to?” It was true: I’d carried a gray shred of that beloved baby blanket in my jeans pocket until it disintegrated in the wash a year earlier.

  “Mama!” I laughed. “Cone of silence. And that color was and always will be nasty. It looks like an eighties hospital sofa.”

  “And eighties hospital sofa suits olive skin.” She tapped her freckled lips, and her eyes widened. “Shoot, is Rob going to do that same thing with his yellow blanket? I should’ve gotten him one made of Teflon.” She painted her lips blind, hand quivering once, without smearing one speck. Then she pouted, smiled, and stuck her tongue out. “So?”

  She was right: The color did suit her. Her lips didn’t look as scary as expected. I opened my mouth to say Could be worse, but when my eyes reached hers, I saw they were wet and too heavy on me.

  “So precious,” she said, grinning at me, and her voice cracked on the last syllable.

  Man, she was drunk.

  “Are you going to tell me why you’re drunk now?”

  Her eyes went sharp, and she started jamming mini–eye shadows into a plastic container that clearly wouldn’t house them all. “It’s just work. Today was bad, Angel. A guy—” She stopped, breaking off again. I held a hand to hers, calming it and preventing continued angry-organization. She looked up at me. “A monster strangled this little girl.”

  “What?” My heart beat hard. She never shared details about work with me. I had glimpsed her on her computer on weekends here and there, but I never saw her in action.

  I was endlessly curious. But I never disturbed her privacy. There were boundaries in our relationship, set a long time ago. We could be best friends. I could speak openly with her about almost anything, and I had. Just not her past, and not her work. You’d be surprised how full and loving a life you could lead without talking about those two cornerstones of a normal person’s existence. But we weren’t normal. Our connection was rooted in something that would be light-years long if unraveled. Something stronger than diamond but intangible on this plane. We sometimes called it cheesy things like mafia rules or kindred spirits, depending on how much bad TV we’d watched that day. But we recognized ourselves in each other, and that recognition cut deeper than the mother-child bond. Deeper than killing for each other, deeper than living for each other.

  “He throttled this little girl. Or I guess a group of men did. It’s hard to know. They’re just … animals. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before at work. But this sicko I work with—my brain-dead partner turns to me after we look at the body and puts her hands around her own throat and goes—bluuuuurgh.” She shook her own throat, popping her eyes out. “As if it’s funny. I just can’t do it anymore.” She reached for my hands. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  Visions of a limp-necked little girl Rob’s age swarmed me. “It’s okay, Mama. I’m always here for you. Don’t say you don’t know that.”

  She laughed shakily. “You shouldn’t be saying that to me. I’m the mom.” She released my hands, covered her face, and uncovered it just as swiftly. Her eyes were burning hot as coals. “Shit, Angel. Some people just don’t get what this life is all about. We all go through our own personal hells at one point or another; we all inflict pain on others or ourselves intentionally or accidentally at one point or another; we all lose shit that we thought we couldn’t live without, but there’s still so much beauty and love and wonder to be found around every corner. How much pain do you have to be in to forget that and give in to the dark, you know?”

  I shook my head—she got grandiose like this sometimes, ranted about life and what it meant. Sometimes I didn’t know if she was oblivious or enlightened.

  “Promise me, Angel—wonder, until the very end?”

  “Wonder, until the very end,” I promised, as I always did.

  “Now let me clean up all this junk,” she said, gripping my face. “Get out of here and do your homework.” She kissed me hard on the cheeks, over and over and over.

  “You’re so drunk,” I said, laughing.

  * * *

  I don’t understand it, but I feel those threads of forever kinship—the kind that can be as soft as spider’s silk and harder than steel—take root in me and reach for Mavi now. It’s something more than garden-variety must-jump-your-bones lust. And she must feel it, too, or she never would have confided in me before.

  But then Charon’s words echo in my head for the millionth time. You’re not special. She’s not connecting with you because you’re different. She thinks you’re someone you’re not. She’ll never meet the real you. She’ll never know the real you.

  If he’s right, I need to know. Before I’m in too deep.

  I know exactly what I need to do, as soon as I’m fed and rested and tucked back inside my fetching flesh costume. I need to tell Mavi who I am before this whole house goes to hell.

  19

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  I oversleep the morning after sneaking around with Dom, missing breakfast. Now that I know these creatures—ghosts, Others, spirits—so intimately, now that I know without a shadow of a doubt that they exist to harm us, it’s difficult to summon the courage to crawl out from under my blankets. Not because I am afraid—what protection would my blankets offer, after all?—but because I am overwhelmed by the amount of information I must gather to help the girls. At least that’s what I tell myself. I rack my brain to remember what the tenth little girl warned of: They need energy, and they cannot get it as you do. They borrow it from you instead. A little at a time, a little more, a little more, until you can’t lift yourself from bed. But she said nothing about the pain I felt last night.

  Why are only the little ones and Lamb falling ill—because they are the weakest? And how on earth can Michelle and Gisella see men near them at night, when I saw nothing at all?

  In my rush to wash up and scavenge a bite to eat before class, I nearly don’t notice the folded note slipped under my door. Please see me in room 1 before breakfast, it reads. Ms. Morency. My blood goes cold. I’ve long missed breakfast, and I can’t know when she left this note. Could she have seen me last night, with Dom? And why do I still care whether she has?

  I knock on her door, and blessedly, there is no answer. So I dash down to the empty breakfast room, snagging a piece of soggy toast and a cup of tea from the picked-over display. I take a sip of my tea and look out onto the ice beyond the windowpanes, muddy gray today to match the building clouds. In fact, I cannot distinguish between the two texturally. The ice will just build and build into a wall, fencing our rock and impervious to everything but spring’s eventual thaw.

  “How’d you sleep?” a deep and familiar voice asks behind me. I turn with a jolt. But it’s Dom, standing by the door to the breakfast room. He shuts it, so we have privacy, and I ignore the bubbling shame and desire I feel.

  “I’ve slept better,” I say, trying for a smile. “Shouldn’t have had that cup of brandy with Lamb.”

  He sits next to me. “Something possessed you,” he says. Icy fingers run up my spine. “That’s what it looked like, at least. Did you see anything?”

  Of course, that’s what I feared and hoped he would say, because once he has confirmed what happened, there can be no excisions from my memory. I can never again convince myself in the light of day that I am not so vulnerable, that our foe isn’t so powerful. I cannot convince myself that what I experienced last night was a strange kind of love and fear intermingled—madness.

  No—I’ll have to remember the truth. A powerful and suffocating force washed over me, its evil and possessive effect as obvious to Dom as it was to me. I look out onto the ice, trying to formulate some reasonable and truthful reply that won’t topple me.

 
“I didn’t see anything, no. But you’re right,” I whisper. “They’re here—whatever we want to call them. And now we need to work out what they want. There must be a way to satisfy the spirits and leave us unharmed. The question is, how do we satisfy the Others if we can’t even communicate?”

  Dom looks a bit flummoxed. He rubs his palms together again—he does this each time he’s considering what to say. “We have one point of connection already.”

  “We do?”

  The breakfast room door creaks open, and I leap from my seat. A group of silent kitchen staff floods the room, clearing the leftover breakfast display with a robotic swiftness. I flare my eyes at Dom and hurry off, leaving him seated alone.

  * * *

  In class, only six girls are present, fidgeting and doodling. The mood is somber. Six sets of eyes are trained on six sheets of paper, and even Sara contains herself, looking a bit beaten down. Michelle remains in the sickroom, and I suppose poor Gisella has returned there. But someone else is missing.

  “Where is Luciana?” I ask.

  The girls whisper as an uneasiness stirs in me. No one speaks up with an answer. Am I to understand that Luciana has fallen ill as well over the course of the night?

  I have no choice but to work on The Giver—chosen only because it’s another adolescent-friendly book I’ve found in English in the house; Lord knows what I’ll do after this. I ask them to detail a memory of significance to them—positive memories only, in as vivid terms as they can manage. I hope the easy assignment will uplift. “Perhaps it’s baking a plum cake with a favorite grandmother,” I say. “Perhaps it’s playing long games of summer tennis with your father. These are memories that root us, that remind us of that for which we are grateful.”

  They play with their pens and pencils and erasers for the first fifteen minutes, building hills of eraser crumbs. Silvina whispers with Mariella until I fix them with a pointed look. They stare up at the ceiling as if the stucco provides answers in braille, if only their fingers could reach. Sara alone writes, slowly but dutifully, which is troubling. I persuade myself to look at her with pride.