by Sara Faring
“Hello?”
There is no answer, and I climb on, taking the steps two at a time; you’d think I was eager to meet the trailing electric tentacles from last night. I shiver with revulsion just as I spot two shadows scampering around the first bend. Smallish, hunched. As I round the corner, sick to my stomach, a silken hand covers my mouth, and I whip around, my first impulse being to bite down—
But I see a familiar, pearly finger held to thin lips over my shoulder. It’s Yesi, wearing her robe, widening her blue eyes, her silver ringlets tied into knots at the base of her skull.
“Jesus!”
“Swamp,” she says, clamping down on my arm with that smooth vise of a hand. “You missed dinner.”
“What are you doing here?”
She holds a finger to her lips again, and the second shadow slinks back around the corner. I squint in the dark: Mariella, with her two long black braids. She places her hands on her hips.
“I was escorting this one back to bed,” Yesi whispers.
“I was looking for Luciana,” Mariella says aloud. “She left clues, you know. Bitten nails in the carpet in her room. They lead toward the window—”
“Shh!” we both whisper back.
She glowers at us. “I’ll find her.”
“We will continue to search for her in the morning. And now you will return to bed,” says Yesi, seizing her by the wrist. “It’s dangerous to sneak about like this at night.”
I nod along, even though my heart swells at the thought of Mariella searching so courageously for her friend.
After we leave Mariella frowning and tucked in bed, Yesi and I scurry back through the dark halls.
“Now will you tell me what you’re doing here?” I ask. “I know you weren’t patrolling for wandering girls.”
She crosses her arms. “I spoke to Mole again. She recounted the girls’ symptoms as described quite poetically by the both of them. And of course it sickened me. All that talk of men fondling them, far beyond where my imagination would’ve gone at their age. She’s wrong to think it’s hysteria.” She lets me go and crosses her arms. “Luciana still hasn’t been found, and I just know something awful happened to her. This would be the perfect place for someone to abuse the girls, you know. They’ve been told to trust everyone—that this castle on the hill is their salvation from parental carelessness, their righteous path to a special kind of womanhood. They’ve been told that Carmela double- and triple-checked everyone’s background—which I doubt, by the by. And Mole’s too exhausted to do right by these girls; between you and me, she should be retired. But in any case, I can’t blindly trust Carmela and Morency to make the right choices anymore now that Luciana’s run off, too. I needed to see for myself what happens to them at night. I just need to.” She looks me up and down, pinching my coat between her fingers. “It looks like you’ve decided to do the same? I can’t say I’m surprised. You’ve had your head on straight all along. Sort of.”
“Oh, Yesi.” I take her in my arms, and she softens in them. I know this is the closest thing to an apology that she’ll offer at the moment, and I can accept that if it means I’m not alone tonight. Perhaps that makes me weak—or simply human.
“I’m relieved to have you here, too, you old Swamp Thing. Christ, it’s spooky up here. And I thought we had it bad in the staff hall. Now come on,” she says, pulling me by the hand. Breathless, we dash to the sickroom and push open the oak door. The room is silent and dark—clouds blanket the moon tonight, and the ice looks drab beneath them. Yesi and I draw back the flowered coverlets on the two sickbeds to find Michelle and Gisella, two warm bundles, snoring.
We sit on the sofa by their beds and wait. Wait for an incident. Wait for a visit from the malicious unknown. “We should go to the other girls’ rooms instead. Surely we’ll witness a disturbance there,” I whisper to Yesi. “After all, Luciana wasn’t in the sickroom last night. She was in her own room.”
She squeezes my hand with her loving fingers of ice. “But the others seem fine. This is our best chance of discovering what ails these two.” She releases me to drape a butter-colored blanket over our shoulders. “Patience.”
I settle into the sofa, determined to patrol the night and do right by the girls. I will myself never to forget the warnings I’ve received, both friendly and hostile, about this house and its residents—be it from a petite ghost girl, fruit of my dreams, or that startling, electric blend of fear and apathy I felt last night in the halls beyond this room. My strength lies in those memories, I think, and my experiences will inform my actions now. But how it soothes me to have Yesi nestled beside me.
* * *
A clap awakens me. I can’t believe I’ve fallen asleep; I look around, bleary-eyed, and though the room remains dark, I see the outlines of shapes in the room, furniture shapes, illuminated by the ice’s supernatural glow outside the window. My hand shoots to Yesi’s, cold and withered in her lap. I sense movement in the room and hear a creaking of floorboards.
A man’s shadow appears. Leaning over Gisella, his arms outstretched. A groan of despair dies in my throat as I wish I could disappear into the wall. I dig my nails into Yesi’s hand, hard enough to signal we’re in trouble, and she awakens, too. “Did we fall asleep?” she asks, voice breaking.
The man’s head swivels on its neck in a crescendo of rapid clicks. He does not shrink away, nor startle. He smiles, a glisten of wet teeth. I shoot to my feet, pulling Yesi up with me. “Who are you?” I hiss, immobile.
The man’s freakishly slender fingers move toward the edges of Gisella’s scalp. Her oval face looks solemn in the path of weak moonlight, lips parted in her dream-filled repose. Yesi rushes to the lamp on the far side of the room and tries the switch with a few shuddering clicks. The bulb has burned out. I can’t make out the identity of the intruder from his position in the shadows, despite knowing every man in the house; he’s shorter and more solid than Domenico. Rangier. And his posture resembles that of no one else in the house. It’s animal in its energetic hunch—malformed.
Veins abuzz, I burst past Yesi and take up the base of the lamp in both hands. Without a second thought, I run toward the man and slam the frame against his skull with a welcome thud. He crumples against the headboard as I swing again and miss him, collapsing when the cord tangles with my ankles.
He straightens himself above me with ease, as if unable to feel pain, and I feel an excruciating stinging across my scalp—a clump of hairs torn at the roots. I grasp for his ankles, scratching at thin, hairy skin with my nails. Yesi shouts and charges toward him, and the pain on my scalp abates, but Yesi falls to the carpet beside me, panting, as the man scrambles to the door. Fleeing.
I struggle to catch my breath and pull myself up before helping Yesi to her feet. “Are you all right?” I whisper to her in the dark. She tugs me, wordlessly, toward the adjoining bathroom, where she turns on a functional light. A purplish-pink splotch spreads on Yesi’s cheek, a hydrangea bloom printed on ivory.
“Are you hurt, Swamp?” Her voice is hoarse.
Blood-tinged flakes line my fingernails, and when I touch my scalp above my right ear, a ratty clump of hair falls. But the droning in my veins prevents me from registering pain.
“No,” I tell her. “Are you?”
Her blue eyes water, and she proffers her fist. I squint to make sense of what she’s holding, because, at first, it looks like a handful of snowflakes. But when I brush them, I feel a prickly bunch of white, short, and curly hair. Lamblike wool.
* * *
Above the sound of rushing blood in my head, I hear the softest sobbing: Gisella. I kneel by the edge of her bed. Her cheeks are damp, her nightgown mussed at the neck and riding up. “How could you let them in?” she whispers, drawing her knees into her chest. Her half-shuttered eyes don’t catch on me; she could still be dreaming. “How could you?”
I gape at her. “I’m so sorry, Gisella.” I adjust her nightgown, and she recoils, so I cover her snugly, as if that will help.
“I’m so sorry. We came to watch you, and we fell asleep for only a moment—”
“They’re disgusting.” Her face is slick with silent tears. “Don’t you see them?” I wipe the droplets from her face and must keep myself from drawing back at the dead feel of her skin.
Mole was correct to tread lightly in her conversations with the girls. I can’t tell Gisella that I might have recognized the man, the solitary man who was leaning over her bed. That it might have been Lamb, her own teacher, he of the curly white fur. I can’t process the thought yet myself. Lamb—whom I spent hours with only last night, who suffered from a heart attack the day before that? No. It’s not possible. Yesi approaches us, face pink and wet. She swaddles herself as she observes Gisella.
“I can’t take this.” Gisella gasps, delirious. “They’ve taken Lu, and soon they’ll take me.” Bile rushes up my throat: This is Gisella, who has never been one to show weakness, if it can be helped. Yesi kneels beside her while I make my way over to Michelle, who has burrowed into her gray blankets. She eyes me from a pocket in her bedcovers—her expression jarringly dead and empty, devoid of trust. After a few seconds, she clamps her eyes shut.
Yesi feeds a babbling Gisella a handy glass of lavender syrup and water until she relaxes. I wet a washcloth with freezing water from the tap and press it to Yesi’s cheek to curb swelling, too stunned to call for Morency or Carmela or even Mole. It is only when Gisella falls asleep again, and Michelle’s breathing slows, that Yesi whispers urgently to me from our perches on the sofa. “It was him. To think it was him all along! There’s nothing evil in this house but him. Christ. He’s the pervert here to abuse vulnerable girls, Swamp. I can’t believe I never saw it before. I can’t believe I trusted him.” She trembles, her nails crimping half-moons into the cloth armrest.
“You’re saying that this whole time, it was Lamb?”
“I don’t have a single doubt it was Lamb.” She fishes around her pocket and juts out a fist of lamby fur. “He’s been manipulating us all. He puts on this act of being an infirm, loopy, lonely old man so that we let down our defenses and treat him like the kindly grandfather we never had.”
I think of how easy it would be to tell her he fed me brandy until I passed out, but I don’t say a word.
“Haven’t you noticed how he strokes their heads?”
I thought he patted their heads like a loving master pats his dogs’, but perhaps I was wrong.
She shudders. “Oh, Christ. We need to tell Carmela tonight. We need to get him out of here.” She stands, the towel dripping on her forehead. “I’ll go right now.”
I’m convinced there’s more to the story—what with others in the house acting out of character, too. Take Sara, Luciana, and that outburst from Mole, and perhaps even Hawk … After my experience with the fishhook paralysis only last night, I formulate an idea. Perhaps the Others possess our friends. I’m afraid to say this to Yesi, though. Afraid because she’s brushed off all my ideas about ghosts before.
“Yesi, you view yourself as the queen of logic and restraint, don’t you? Then you must admit we didn’t see him do anything to them. We must speak to him,” I say. “The Lamb I know would never touch the girls. And he wouldn’t have beaten you to the ground, either.”
“It was self-defense on his part, once he’d been exposed as what he truly is and you walloped him with that lamp. He’s a dangerous man. A sick man.” Yesi’s face contorts—the swelling admonishes me. “He snuck into the sickroom in the middle of the night and touched Gisella. God knows what he did before we woke. How can you protect him?” she asks. “You haven’t even known him for more than a couple of months. Carmela must have plumbed the bowels of the earth during her recruitment. Imagine! A man retired for his wandering fingers.” Her hands curl into fists. “How did it never occur to us that his shakes are an invention? That he faced retirement because of the vilest acts?”
I feel a sudden swell of nausea and hunch over my knees, bringing the heel of my hand to my mouth. Goddamn these Others.
Yesi pats me on the back before propping me up by my shoulders. “Enough of that. This isn’t the time to be weak. We must tell Carmela right now.”
A hot and rank froth surges up my throat. “I can’t. I’m going to be sick.” I run to the adjoining bathroom. I shut the door behind me and fold over the toilet, palms pressed against the tile floor, heaving into the bowl, nothing but bile in my stomach.
My attempt to learn, to help, to fight led to this most gruesome discovery. We’re so isolated here, I think. Trapped on this rock with the wretches around us, bleeding us dry and assuming control of us, one by one. I curl beside the bowl to let the nausea pass. When I pull myself up and back into the girls’ room, Yesi has disappeared. I shiver on the sofa until daybreak, watching the girls sleep as best as they can, scanning the room for more inexplicable evil. Only a patch of bloodred mold flourishes along a jagged crack in the ceiling.
Yesi and Mole find me as the sun rises beyond the ice. “Carmela wants to speak with both of us,” Yesi announces as Mole rushes toward the sleeping girls. “She asked me to fetch you. Now.”
20
ANGEL: 2020–2000
Sometime before dawn, I return to Dom’s room, only to find that he isn’t in bed. He’s not slumped on his chaise under the royal-blue throw, staring at motes drifting through space. Not in his lavish marbled bathroom, collecting splayed onion-thin rolling papers. I feel the panic of a parent who ogled the electronics display in a Costco for one minute, only to turn and find his kid isn’t at the chicken quesadilla sampler station, as promised: Dom’s not in his room, period.
“Where are you, for Pete’s sake?” I shout, as if he’s a trained husky who will hustle back to me, tongue wagging, wondering who Pete is.
I circle wider: He isn’t anywhere in the family’s quarters. I search the house to find him, passing through the jigsaw puzzle of sitting rooms, of libraries, of staff quarters. The house is a haunted labyrinth—it would overwhelm if I couldn’t break through walls. I poke my head through an upstairs wall and catch a glimpse of the breakfast patio below. The sun is about to rise, staining the flagstones a muted red.
That’s when I see a figure, a solitary figure, slumped at the edge of the balcony rail, dangling feet in the void.
I drop beside him in the blink of an eye, recognizing his lankiness. “Dom?” I ask tentatively. The body turns to me, eyes glazed and dark.
It isn’t the Dom I know, no—not fully.
It is his muscled skeleton, leaner than usual. His face looks gaunt and shrunken by sadness. Have I not been feeding you enough food? I think; and it’s an incongruous enough thought in that moment that I feel a wave of anguish pass through me, salt-tinged and draining, as I avoid catching sight of his eyes again.
“I’m tired of this,” he says, croaking like a corpse with dried-out pipes. He doesn’t specify what he means, but I know.
“You can see me?”
He grimaces, kicks his leg.
I don’t understand it—why he should have consciousness now, and choose this path, when he’s been too drained of energy to try anything so drastic before. Has my hosting changed him irrevocably, too?
“I want you to live,” I say, even though what I mean is, I need you to live.
How do I coax him off the edge, when I couldn’t have pulled myself back, once upon a time? What unselfish reason can I possibly give him for living? He isn’t conscious of his life anymore—he doesn’t own that life.
I took it away from him.
He shifts more of his weight toward the edge, leaning into the wind. He wants to drop himself off the side like a soiled bundle.
* * *
I feel a sucking blackness inside, a swell of sympathy: I’ve been so quick to dismiss him as a loser unworthy of holding the reins of his own life when he’s a human like Mavi, a human who deserves some shred of dignity. Who deserves some control over how his time is spent.
It’s strange: Looking at Dom’s own f
ace now—the one spot I do try to avoid, when outside of him—and watching tears fall from his eyes, forming furious rivers on his cheeks that I didn’t think him capable of producing, I almost feel as if my own cheeks are wet.
I pity him. But I crave more time here myself, even as the house and its inhabitants rattle onward to their assured destruction by Others. I care too much about Mavi, about Dom’s strength, about the tenth girl herself and what she promises. And even though I fear my attachment, I can’t deny its existence.
I try to flit inside him, to be the selfish hero and pull him back, and am met by a tremendous pressure. “Stop,” he says, angling away from me, shoving at the air I inhabit, his bony thighs skidding on the railing.
But I have to persist and push inside him, knowing no other home. I can’t say whether being host to a parasite like me is a fate worse than death. When I wanted to die more than anything else in the world, I wouldn’t have allowed someone else to take over my body, to go through the motions while obliterating my own pained spirit. Even if it kept my loved ones satisfied.
No. Instead, I said, Screw everything, my one right as a human being is to throw myself off the goddamned edge into oblivion whenever I damn well please.