The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  Angel crosses his arms. The tension in the air is palpable; our threesome can exist only so long. Are we forced allies, fighting a common enemy? Are we fools, or jealous friends? I resist the urge to pipe up and protect Angel from Yesi and vice versa. I pretend everything is normal, even though it can’t be.

  “Angel?” I ask in a tone as gentle as I can muster.

  “If the tenth girl is one of these girls from legend, she can do more than force Others away. She can reconnect us with lost loved ones. She can—” He pauses, eyes clouding over. “Who knows what other miracles she can perform.”

  And somehow, even Yesi is silenced by this prospect. So I refrain from complicating matters by airing my long-simmering theory: that this ghost might simply be Carmela’s dead daughter. How much easier it would be if she was a paranormal force of good who could help us fight off the hordes of Others.

  “We can’t sit around waiting for this girl to reappear. We should confront Carmela anyway,” I suggest. “Whether it’s to finally convince her of the danger we’re in and launch an escape plan, or to mine her for information on this girl.”

  “Carmela almost murdered me with a letter opener when I pressed her on the tenth girl,” Angel says. “She told me never to speak of it again.”

  “Then the two of us will pursue that anger in our exchanges with her. Crack her facade, and squeeze the truth out of her.”

  Yesi nods. “And if Carmela doesn’t break open for us, we’ll take advantage of the fact that you’re her detested flesh and blood, Angel-as-Dom. The Dom dominator.” She smirks, and Angel raises his hands in the air, as if accepting Yesi won this round.

  And so our plan is set. Yesi and I will corner Carmela, that ironclad box of a woman, and break her open at last, with guile or force. Whether we’ll find compassion or cruelty inside remains to be seen.

  I cannot wait.

  * * *

  When Carmela misses breakfast, Morency offers no explanation. Instead, she announces that all classes will be moved to the dining room at breakfast, after Mole suffered a fall attempting to fetch papers from her cottage classroom in the storm. In the midmorning, a morning we cannot perceive but for the clock reading a certain way, while Gisella and Michelle recuperate in bed, the faintings begin.

  First Isabella, in the stone corridor. Christina, in the breakfast hall. Diana, falling off her dining room chair. They faint dead away in their makeshift morning classes, young girls crumpling to the floor like old wilted flowers robbed of a vase. As Mole accuses them of succumbing to hysteria, of wanting to play hooky, we carry them to their rooms, limp and pale, where they inevitably complain of poor sleep. Of nausea. Of anxiety—a concept some of them don’t even understand, yet can detail—a rather unspecific but all-consuming fear. They speak of being the victims of some inexplicable theft, a theft only Yesi can understand.

  Mariella approaches me at lunch as I serve warmed-up soup and the last of the sliced fruit to the group. “Miss Quercia,” she whispers to me before looking around the dining room, empty of all her friends except a glum Silvina. Sara refused to leave her bedroom. “What can I do?”

  I inhale slowly. How can I feed her strength? How can I advise her to stay healthy when all her peers are fading? I cannot tell her to fight sleep, the only weapon I know, when it’s clear she’s buzzing from leftover adrenaline that is sure to dry up soon.

  “You can eat well and nourish yourself,” I tell her, sneaking her a whole apple and a double serving of mushroom soup, the best we have left.

  She sets them down, eyes blazing. “I meant to help everyone else.”

  My hands wobble on the ladle: This girl before me has a strength I could have only dreamed of when I was her age. It might be my exhaustion, but I almost tear up, and my chest wobbles with pride.

  I nod at her. “We’ll do rounds to check on the girls after lunch.”

  “They’ll get better, won’t they?” she asks, brow setting into a strong line, as the electricity flickers in and out. “We’ll work our hardest to cure them.”

  “Yes. We will do our best to help until doctors come.” It is a gentle lie: I cannot know how a doctor would help us now, much less reach this rock. But I gather the food, placing it in her hands, then steer her by her delicate shoulders toward an empty seat by Silvina. “Now, eat.”

  * * *

  By the time our sad lunch hour ends, Carmela has not resurfaced. Morency informs us that a doctor will arrive imminently for the girls. Yet shortly thereafter, the afternoon supply boat is canceled, and she orders the shutters to be shut, one by one, closing off Vaccaro School from the oppressive rain. Every able-bodied member of the house helps to lock us in further—six hands must tug each warped shutter closed, and three faces go dark anew when both sides are secured. Electricity is spotty, and more often than not, the house feels like a lightless tomb. Someone generously fumbles with damp matches, and new candles are lit for each of us to carry. Mostly tallow candles remain, and the smell of roasted animal fat thickens the air, reminding us of butchery and our rumbling stomachs in one go.

  With our help, Morency converts an oversize and unusually warm carpeted sitting room on the second floor—once bearing a covered grand piano—into a larger sickroom. “It has the air of a refugee camp,” she says to no one in particular as we inspect the fine lace of fungus growing along one wall. “Mess and misery included.” We arrange nine cots in neat little rows of three, both hopeful that Luciana will be found and terrified all the girls will fall. Mariella and Silvina read to the sick girls, until Silvina drops to the floor herself, drained of the little energy she had left. An overworked Mole and I carry her onto another free cot. Only Mariella remains up, and though her face is gray from fatigue, she refuses to rest on the final bed, helping until Morency returns to relieve us.

  * * *

  Before dinner, Yesi, Angel, and I roam around the house, and the corridors are so quiet one could hear a pin drop. Carmela has all but vanished, and Sara has disappeared from her bedroom, too. We wander into the empty kitchen, only to find that many of its appliances no longer function, and a slippery grime coats its tiles.

  “Where is the kitchen staff?” Yesi whispers, opening the cabinets to peruse the little palatable food left.

  I can only shake my head: I haven’t seen them in days, not since conditions worsened. Wary as they were of this place, they were adept at keeping its banal evils in check. It was a kind of magic we never appreciated. It might be twisted, but I pray they fled to safety.

  We locate several cans of beans and tomato soup and go about heating them on the one gas burner that still works. At dinner, Angel, Yesi, and I share a table with Mariella, while Mole and Armadello make up another. Over our meager portions, we overhear Armadello lament the failed search for Luciana and Mole gossip about Mr. Lamm, as if Mariella isn’t present.

  “Sometimes they put on the sweetest facades,” she says, her voice carrying from the other table. “No wonder he never married. And on top of it all, now we are short one more, caring for the sick and cleaning up while he lazes around in his room.”

  Mariella, sitting beside me, nudges me. “Is that true about Mr. Lamm?”

  “Dr. Molina’s weariness is getting the best of her,” Yesi snaps, on her other side.

  Mole drops her spoon with a metallic clang. Chastened, perhaps, she escorts Mariella back upstairs to tuck her in before resuming her sickroom shift.

  Yesi fixes her critical gaze on a very pale Angel next as he tucks into his sorry bowl of beans. He stops eating midmouthful, and he excuses himself, explaining he must let Dom rest so they can recover their strength. I must watch him leave with a concerned wistfulness because Yesi flicks my arm.

  “Stop that,” she hisses. “Worry about our own kind.”

  He does feel like our kind to me. I almost remind her he is our only connection to the Others, but she does do more than her part by feeding him.

  * * *

  Before our sickroom shift, Yesi and I take La
mm some leftover beans and some crusts of stale bread with jam, but he can’t even bring himself to the door to answer us. “Please go, my dears,” he wheezes through the door. “Thank you for coming, but Madame De Vaccaro has asked that I stay here, out of sight.”

  But I push inside the forest-green haven, knowing better. Huddled over his miniature desk, he compulsively journals what he remembers and what he does not remember, as if to unlock some explanation in his memory. Yesi, hesitant, toes her way in after me and gasps: Fat clumps of hair identical to those she found in her grip are missing from his head and littered on the floor.

  “I don’t remember anything,” he says, his teary eyes shellacked, as he raps his skull again and again with a roughness I’ve never witnessed in him. “I don’t remember anything at all. But that, of course, sounds like what a monster would say if accused of such behavior. Does it not?”

  “It isn’t your fault,” I offer softly.

  “You were … you were possessed,” Yesi adds, rendered inarticulate for once.

  Convulsing, he shakes his bare head, convinced we’re either devils come to ease out a confession or naive friends pandering to his delusions. We cannot persuade him of his innocence, no matter what I say. “There is a special place in hell for people like me,” he repeats again and again. “I’ve fought my animal instincts all my life, only for my unconscious mind to betray me.”

  It sickens me to hear him speak this way.

  “We should have kept trying to explain,” Yesi tells me outside his room, her lip bloodied from nervous biting. But we worry about the pandemonium that would ensue if we revealed the hopelessness of our situation to our fractured group. “I’ll recant what I said when we next see Carmela,” she whispers to me. “Perhaps he’ll listen to that soulless witch. It’s the least I can do.”

  * * *

  We spend another sleepless night, some of the hours mute, listening as the wind brings new sheets of rain crashing down. Cracks spread through our walls and ceilings like spiderwebs. Centimeter-long fissures grow to a meter or more in length, their edges jagged like rotted teeth, as if the house’s walls are hungry.

  We feed the six sick girls stories of our own invention (including the Zapuche legend of the girls, sanitized of sacrifice mentions) and the last fresh vegetables in soup in an effort to keep them awake—their conscious hours are maddeningly few and far between. Watching them yawn only makes my own eyelids heavier. While Mole tends to them, wiping their brows and administering syrup with a worsening resentment, Morency shuttles around uselessly, moving furniture, lighting candles only to blow them out, deciding an irresponsible number are lit, and staring at the walls colonized by mold. She also tries, repeatedly, to rattle open the shutters, and I cannot tell you what she looks for outside. But she needles us less. She hasn’t mentioned Domenico or the rules since I stayed. Her shrill severity softens into a palpable internalized anxiety.

  “Where is Sara?” I ask her as I spoon broth into Diana’s mouth.

  “With the madame,” she replies crisply.

  “And where is Madame De Vaccaro?”

  “Occupied,” she says as Silvina’s body rattles with a gasping, choking cough one cot away, drawing our attention.

  “Do you agree with her decision to keep the school open?” I whisper—total provocation, I admit, because how could a sane person agree?

  She glares ferociously, setting down the bowl of clear soup she’d been feeding Gisella with a clatter, soaking the linens with oily drops. “The heavens rule us now.”

  And I suppress a scream of frustration.

  * * *

  Yesi and I search for Carmela ourselves as soon as we are excused from our duties. The knot in the pit of my stomach grows more gnarled as we wander the corridors—chilled to the bone, hearing nothing. Where in God’s name has she been during these horrific hours? If she is with Sara, she must know the severity of the girls’ symptoms, as well as just how much the situation has deteriorated in the past day. She was moved enough to call the doctor, so surely we can persuade her to send for a larger boat to take the girls home at last.

  I feel ready to tear off Carmela’s face. But Yesi advises me to tread carefully around her, since she conceals her knowledge of the house—of the tenth girl—for reasons we cannot understand. Yesi contrives an official purpose for our visit to her, to prevent her from shutting us out as she did last time: to formally recant what she said about Lamb. “Perhaps we must play by her set of rules to outfox her,” she whispers as we pass Carmela’s office door a third time. And I had sworn I would never follow her rules again. But perhaps this is different.

  I stop Yesi, then, hearing lively chatter where there was once silence—enthused parroting. Carmela, all sparkle inside her office, engages in an animated, upbeat, one-sided conversation, like nothing I’ve ever heard. We press ourselves up against the crack to listen and wait, hand in sweating hand.

  “Of course,” Carmela effuses. “Anything. Anything.” A block of silence, perhaps the faintest, gravelly whispering. “Anything at all.”

  “Who is she with?” I whisper to Yesi. She shrugs.

  “Must you go?” Carmela asks, a note of anxiety tempering her elation. “Must you? Don’t leave the child. She’s a shell without you—a shell!” My shoulders stiffen. But there is no audible reply. We allow another couple of minutes of silence to pass before knocking, hearing only sniffling and the shuffling of paper.

  “Enter,” she calls, her voice stiffened.

  When I glimpse the scene inside, my knees buckle.

  Carmela sits in her office chair, fanning herself with her pad of paper, her hair tied up into a loose twist. She has closed her own shutters, too, and the rain batters against them. Her candles are lit, and her hair looks bone-white in the low light, her skin waxy and thin. Perhaps it’s the lack of eye makeup, but she looks simultaneously childlike and wizened.

  And beside her is Sara.

  Sara, slumped in a chair, blending into the darkness behind her, clothed in a dirtied smock dress, sunken eyes misted over. She’s breathing, barely. Her ribs crumple inward.

  My shaking hands curl into fists—was Carmela talking to her? This sick child, who should have been in a sickbed all day?

  She’s a shell without you.

  Sara, who for so long defied me and shocked her peers with grotesque behavior, is, indeed, nothing but a shell before me.

  My stomach plummets as I recall what happened with Lamb and with Angel. Hosts to energetic parasites.

  Must you go?

  The truth cracks me over the head: Sara has been possessed by an Other, who has since gone. But how long has the poor girl been possessed? When was the true Sara first lost to us? I glance at Yesi and find her eyes wide and fearful—gone is the determination we shared as we searched for Carmela. Gone is the certainty we could persuade her to listen to us.

  “Well?” asks Carmela sharply. “Speak up.”

  So she knows. Carmela must know. About the Others, about possession. What else could this odd coupling mean? Sara has been possessed by an Other, and Carmela has used the child to convene with this Other. I think back to how attentive Carmela was to Sara when she first became ill, weeks ago. Was she possessed from the start and sequestered by Carmela in the first sickroom to be used as a mouthpiece? I lick my dry lips. “What is Sara doing here?”

  Carmela smiles with arctic coldness, mouth sealed shut. We wait in silence for an answer that doesn’t come, as her longer-than-life shadow flickers in the candlelight.

  Yesi clears her throat. “Mr. Lamm is a victim,” she says at last, breaking the silence. “He was possess—”

  “We have spoken to the student in question,” Carmela interrupts nonsensically, “and have decided that until the matter is resolved, Mr. Lamm will remain in his quarters. That is final. If we require your further assistance, you shall be made aware.”

  Her droning fills me with rage: I cannot listen to a moment more. I must crack this woman. I must show her
we cannot be brushed aside.

  “Madame De Vaccaro—”

  The shutters crash against the windows, and I will myself steady.

  “We know about the tenth girl.”

  My mention is meant to shock her—to provoke her. But all that results is a silence. An abatement in the rain, if only for a moment. Yesi’s hand turns to ice around my forearm. I cannot bring myself to hold Carmela’s gaze. But I watch as her hands fold on the desk.

  “No, you don’t,” she states. “You know nothing at all. Once upon a time, I might have condescended to claim I admire your imagination. But to think that you, an ignorant child, could wrest any shred of control in this situation: Well … that is a failure of logic.”

  Desperation surges up in me, its hot claws racing up my throat. I will not be shut down. “We’ll find her, and she will help us again,” I say, regurgitating what Angel has said to me so many times, desperate for its pale venom to burn her. “She warned us, you know. Warned us about this place.”

  “That’s quite enough, Miss Quercia. Any warning you believe you received was quite unintentionally given.”

  A shiver runs up my spine. Could she be correct?

  “Th-that’s not true,” I stammer. I remember the girl’s flat black eyes, her ropes of hair torn out by the roots. A tormented creature. “She told me herself no one should have returned here.”