The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “The little girl who visited me? Is she one of you?”

  I shake my head. “Something in between. A sacrificed girl. I think she’s hiding here. Even—even Carmela is looking for her.”

  Her attention snaps back in full, as if Carmela’s acknowledgment of the legend turns it into cut-and-dried history. “Truly? Carmela knows about her?”

  I nod. “There’s a Zapuche legend about girls like her.”

  Her eyes flicker with interest. And so I tell her the first story Mama ever told me.

  In every generation, 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 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, she could tell you the color of your soul. What follows is one of her adventures in Patagonia …

  On this day, the girl happened upon a peaceful Zapuche village that had lived on guanaco—a type of wild llama in the region—for centuries. These guanaco were so gentle that they would graze within a hundred feet of the Zapuche, instinctually aware that the tribe only killed what they needed to survive.

  But when foreign ranchers moved in, they killed the guanaco on sight, believing they competed with their sheep for foraging and pasture. They left them in the roads, rotting away and riddled with shot, so that they could not be used for food. Soon, the guanaco were decimated, and the Zapuche suffered in turn.

  The girl recognized the problem, and she came up with a clever solution to help her people. Can you guess?

  She would help the guanaco transform into butterflies around the foreigners—chameleonlike butterflies that could pick up the color of their lush Patagonian surroundings. That way, the guanaco could exist freely in their new form—but when captured by a Zapuche, they would reclaim their old one.

  Mavi is lost in thought when I finish. “There are butterflies like that here,” she tells me, eyes distant. “Ones that take on the colors of their surroundings. I’ve seen them myself.” She settles her gaze on me, and it’s much sharper than expected, even though her voice is soft. “But that’s just a story, Angel. We can’t simply fly away.”

  I clear my throat and blink away the humiliation. Of course: This is deadly real for her, in a way it could never be for me. “I think I can find more information about her,” I say. “Real information. I promise.” And I resolve to give this despicable source one final try.

  * * *

  When I leave her and Dom, I flit over to the cloud house. Charon’s sitting on his cloud chair, pressing a cheesesteak between his dirty fingertips and studying the indentations. He grunts upon seeing me.

  “Cute heart-to-heart with the English teacher. Feeling relieved and guilt-free now? Even though you sold yourself down the river with your little reveal?”

  It chills me every time I remember just how much he witnesses in the house. I think of my tears on the patio, and I burn with shame.

  “You know, I don’t give her enough credit,” he continues. “Telling her you can stay friends if you spill your guts about the Others? Brilliant manipulation.”

  “I’m not here to talk about that.”

  He sniffs at the soggy sandwich edge. “Aren’t you a little miffed your girlfriend didn’t inquire as to how your condition affects you?” Charon asks, a smirk playing on his lips. “Aren’t you wondering why she didn’t ask you point-blank if you’re dead?”

  I blink at him. And even though I don’t want to admit it, he’s right.

  Shouldn’t it terrify her and exhilarate her, this idea of existing after death? Shouldn’t it remind her of her mother and the other relatives she never knew? Shouldn’t it give her hope of reconnecting with them—even if it’s a misguided hope?

  Shouldn’t she wonder what happened to me?

  But those conversations could fill a lifetime, and we’ve had no time at all.

  “I came to ask about the tenth girl one last time,” I say instead. “I need to talk to her. And I know you know her. You see everything in the house. Don’t lie to me.”

  Belching, he shakes his head. “Jeez, sometimes I wish you were a Cabbage Patch Kid or a Furby or one of those mindless gurgling pieces of shit you can turn off. Logic just doesn’t work with you.” He considers me. “For Pete’s sake, kid. You’re supposed to be having fun. I’ve said it plenty, and I’ll say it again: You’re going to feel like all that time spent with the English teacher—all the time searching for this tenth girl—is a real waste someday. Nothing in there is real for you. Get it?”

  “It feels real to me. Mavi’s special.”

  He snorts. “Special is such an empty, piece-of-shit word. But to your point, she’s as special as I’m special, kid, and my partner used to say I must’ve been hit in the head by an ass’s hoof as a tit-suckling infant.”

  Partner. It’s the first time I’ve heard Charon drop a nugget about his old life.

  “You do realize this doesn’t last forever?” he inquires before wolfing down a quarter of the steak filling.

  I don’t answer, feeling those same damn tears from the patio well up.

  “You’re in too deep,” he says at last, mouth full. “You’re a nice enough kid, but you care too much about shit that doesn’t matter. The English teacher. Any human in that goddamn house—” He swallows, then blows the stinking air from his mouth. “Let’s say your tenth girl exists,” he continues carefully, setting down his sandwich. “What’s she meant to do for you?”

  My answer rushes to mind because I’ve known it in my bones so long, with or without admitting it to myself. It’s impossible to speak it aloud without sounding completely unhinged, and I know it. But I say it all the same. “She can—she can reconnect me with my loved ones.”

  He groans. “There are no ‘missed connections’ here, kid. We’re born alone, and we die alone. What happened to screw you up so much?” He lifts his sandwich. “Lose your mommy? Is that why you’re desperate to pick up an emotional sugar mama in the house? Is that why you haven’t diddled her?”

  Am I so fucking obvious? Fury flames inside me, venomous words flaring up behind it. “You’re a condescending piece of shit, Charon. You’re so far up your own asshole you don’t realize you’re passive, hypocritical scum, spying on everyone else because you’re trapped in a dark room all day, doomed to jacking yourself off and shoving cheesesteaks down your gullet. I don’t need to put up with you, you pathetic old asshole. I don’t need your shit.”

  “Bite me,” he spits, hurling his sandwich onto the ground like a gauntlet. It bursts open, splashing the cloud with meat. “I can’t be an asshole and be up my asshole, too. Kind of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it situation. But that doesn’t matter—as always, you’re missing the point. You’ve made your choice, looks like. Go suck at the teat of your little girlfriend-slash-surrogate-mommy a bit more while you still can.” The bits of sandwich melt through the clouds. “The Others will bite off your crystal dick when they catch wind of you. And Others can die their own death, too, you know, and it’s gnarly. But in the meantime, you’re dead to me. Dead dead.”

  And he gives me cheese-flecked double middle fingers.

  25

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  I visit Yesi alone before what would have been her afternoon class time, slipping through the unlocked bathroom pass-through door. She sleeps in bed, as peaceful as an oil painting of an angel, tangled in her baby-blue sheets but undisturbed. I consider the monstrous details I learned from Angel—how the Others feed from dreams, and how quality of dreams differs—and wonder what richness there is to be mined from inside her skull right now. Angel says younger people seem to have richer dreams in term of quality of nourishment if not … flavor. It helps to be robotic in my thinking about it—to
ascribe adjectives that make no sense, to be analytical and free of emotion, if word choices in your head can grant you such a freedom. Yesi is older than I am, but she looks as if she’s only a girl. Can so shallow a factor affect the Others’ perception of their feed quality? Or when Yesi stopped growing, did biology preserve the purity and richness of some secret garden in her mind? I wonder when someone last fed from her dreams. Could they be feeding now, plucking glossy memories like plums? I don’t feel any currents of energy in the air. Hear any rumblings. See any spiderwebs drawn from her temples. My human senses are woefully insufficient; I cannot imagine how this substance Angel believes is so integral to us human beings is stolen from her fragile body nightly. And worst of all: Her racked mind supplies the common feed for the monsters abusing us all.

  I gently prod her shoulder, delicate and bird-boned. Her lids spread to show a sliver of periwinkle, and she half smiles at the bowl of blueberries I brought—the withered ones left from the last supply boat. “Did anything happen while I was sleeping?” she asks before looking up at the skylight in the bathroom, where a fierce rain now beats down upon the panes. “Christ, it’s turned into an ugly day.” Her peaceful expression hardens. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised after the night we had.”

  She cleanses her face and settles back in bed to eat the blueberries one by one, as if in a trance. For the briefest moment, she comes out of herself to watch me carefully, recognizing that I’ve news. I gather the courage to tell her what Angel told me about himself. I spin the words together into a story she will accept as best as I can—she does me the courtesy of refraining from laughing outright, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end when I realize she’s observing me with the faintest trace of fear. I wait until the end to mention the feeding.

  “And who do they supposedly feed from?” she asks, crossing her arms. “The girls?”

  “Anyone and everyone.”

  “Even us?” She waves dismissively, avoiding my eyes. “Oh, Swamp. Come on. Dom’s pulling your leg. I can’t be sure what his endgame is, though. Doesn’t seem like the best way to charm someone into bed, by telling her you’re a ghostly force bringing new life to an old body. Unless what he’s trying to say is that his penis has mystical, life-bringing powers—”

  “Yesi, I’m serious,” I say as she trembles from cold. I unfold her arms and take her hands in my own to feed them some warmth. “They feed from our dreams, and with that energy, they can possess our bodies. Like they possessed Lamb. Like they possess Dom.” I flinch when I speak his name.

  She wrenches back her hands, and her knees flinch upward. The bowl topples off her lap, launching blueberries across the floor. “Have you lost your mind? Or have you been possessed by a lunatic? Is this some kind of elaborate ruse you’ve created to convince me that Lamb didn’t harass Gisella? That he was possessed by some body snatcher? Because I won’t believe it. I can tell you I’ve never been fed from. I’m not that kind of girl.”

  Now I’m the one who can’t meet her eyes. I can’t bring myself to taint this notion she has of her own self-sufficiency and power; it’s as clear as day to me that Yesi is terribly strong and special, a creature of absurd brainpower, but the sense of violation is so keen in learning you’ve been fed from nightly that it overshadows any other vision of the self, at least temporarily. She becomes a unique victim without her own knowledge, a ghostly Lolita, a bag of unearthly flesh.

  “He told me it doesn’t affect us as much as it affects the girls. But the Others have fed from us at night,” I say, treading carefully. “They take threads of dreams. It strengthens them, but it makes our sleep less restful. It can tinker with our memories.” As I speak the words, I know perhaps I’ve said too much at once. If memory loss is a symptom of being fed from too much, Yesi will understand the level of abuse she’s endured. And the girls—I think of the trouble they faced when working on that memory exercise days ago.

  Her eyes lose focus. I take back her hands and squeeze them, still dreadfully cold. “Yesi?” Her face turns the pale shade of rotted cabbage. She runs to the bathroom and vomits blue spatter into the toilet. I rush after her to hold her hair back. When she settles back on the tile, I soak a towel and wring out the cool water to place it across her forehead.

  “This is too elaborate a lie for you, Swamp,” she says weakly. “I know you’re telling the truth.” I want to shove her and hug her at the same time.

  “Why are they here?” she asks me. “And why now? I suppose it must have to do with the curse on this place.” She regards me with bloodshot blue eyes. “Silly me. I thought it was the primitive Zapuche way of describing the virus.”

  “Do you feel them?” I kneel beside her. “Do you feel ill?”

  “I’ve always suffered from a poor memory. Nothing more than that.” She curls on the sodden bath mat. “My grandmother could tell me a story about an afternoon we shared a week or five years ago, and I wouldn’t remember a single detail. I couldn’t for the life of me do so now, either. I could remember plots of books just fine—just not the turns of my own life. She told me the ghosts were stripping me of my memories. I told her that her business about ghosts was madness. But she must have been right. My grandmother was right. I don’t understand it. How could she be right? Spirits stealing memories. The premise itself is absurd.” She fixes her eyes on me. “I don’t feel ill like the girls. I don’t, and I won’t imagine that I do to force your pity and my own. But I don’t know how to explain how I feel, lacking an impression of the shape of my past. I’ve tried and tried to explain it in writing. I suppose it’s been happening so long I’ve been used to it—I’m not sure what my natural state truly is. Can any of us? But that’s why I continue to write. Continue to draw the threads out of myself—to understand.”

  “Don’t stress yourself, Yesi. We can leave. We’ll shut down the school and move everyone away. Whatever is best.”

  “I’m not making myself understood.” She takes my hands in her clammy ones. “Suppose it has nothing at all to do with this place?” she tells me softly. “I can’t help but wonder if they follow me, Mavi. I think they might have found me again, along with a rich treasure trove of new victims.”

  I thought she might blame herself. I did the same, momentarily, when Angel told me he arrived when I did. Everyone considers oneself to be the foster parent to some terrible monster inside that courts disaster when given free rein.

  “It all has to do with the Zapuche curse. I promise,” I say. “Angel read about it in history books and showed me evidence.”

  “Evidence,” Yesi says shakily.

  “A shaman cursed the land, opening a path for spirits, with the intention of receiving their assistance in keeping European colonizers off their tribal land. But the spirits ran amok instead. So every generation, the Zapuche sacrificed a girl to keep the spirits at bay. When the sacrifice ritual was lost, so was the ability to fend them off.”

  “I suppose we can’t just throw Angel out onto the ice as our sacrifice,” she says coolly, crossing her arms. The humor returning.

  “No,” I say. “But Angel can help us figure out another way of saving ourselves. He knows so much about this. I promise.” I think I mean the words. What does one call a liar who would die wanting to believe her lies?

  She scrutinizes me with two shaded eyes. “Angel. You and your Angel. You seem so sure that Angel will help us save ourselves from his own kind. If you believe you can trust him, then why exactly is Angel who he is, Mavi? How can he be so trustworthy while still being one of these abominable creatures who sucks the life out of us?” She drops her arms to her sides. “I think our lives will depend on untangling that paradox.”

  * * *

  As evening comes, the rain builds on itself, minor storms coalescing into a force of nature of biblical proportions. Yesi and I spend all night huddled together in my bed, watching the thrashing against the lonely skylight pane. “I’d rather die than sleep again,” she whispers to me as we wait for Angel to r
eturn, though both of us know eventually we won’t have the option of melodramatically announcing our courage nor staying awake. I tell her Angel’s legend of the tenth girl, with its mention of the chameleonic butterflies she, too, has seen, and the talk of sacrifices and fantastic powers brings a curious glint back to her eyes.

  When Angel knocks, Yesi rises to open the door herself, and she inspects him for a long minute before opening the door wider. “I’m relieved to hear you aren’t Domenico,” she says, letting him by. “He was a real beast.”

  We can’t help but grin at this odd olive branch she’s offered.

  “Now on to the serious business,” she adds, dropping back onto the bed with a dark expression. “What next, Archangel Gabriel? Bestow upon us your message. Lead us from the darkness into God’s light.”

  Angel’s grin freezes. Once more, I am struck by the thought that he wasn’t entirely aware of what he’d signed up for by revealing his truth to me.

  “Why can’t we escape with the girls on the next supply boat?” I ask, piping up.

  As if on cue, the storm batters the bathroom skylight even harder.

  “It’s clearly impossible without God’s and Carmela’s help, Swamp,” Yesi says, snapping at me. “Are you blind to the conditions outside? How would we distract Morency and Carmela, then bundle all the sick girls onto that tiny, flimsy boat? And in case you’ve forgotten, Our Lady Carmela manages the boat schedule.”

  “Yesi’s right, Mav. Scratch the boat.” Angel rubs at the skin between his eyes. “I still think we should focus on finding the tenth girl.”

  But I don’t feel comfortable allowing this elusive, unidentified girl to be our only hope—our only focus. I remember the terror I felt when I encountered her in my room. “A little ghost girl who speaks in riddles and hides in the shadows, claiming she’s good for only a warning. A little ghost girl Yesi thought I had hallucinated.”

  Yesi flaps her hand, dismissing me. “If she warned you about the Others, providing such specific information, I’m willing to admit that the being you saw was more than the physical embodiment of your psyche’s warning that the unholy walk these halls. Again: Your imagination isn’t that rich, Swamp.” She turns her dictatorial gaze on Angel. “Still: Let’s say this girl can give us knowledge of the sacrifice ritual that protects us against the Others—if such a ritual even exists. Why would you want to find her, Angel? Are you such a self-loathing Other? Or do you hope to fly under the radar and live on indefinitely in your charming little costume?” Yesi’s words could decapitate a stone statue.