by Sara Faring
“Oh, do stop babbling, Miss Quercia. I am an imaginative person, too. Far more imaginative than you are, as it happens. And I am certain there is nothing you could ever invent that would rattle me.” She raises one hand toward the door. “You may go.”
But I push on. “She told me there are evil forces in the house causing people to act out of character, and I now know this to be true.” I glance at Sara, whose jaw hangs loose on her cadaverous face. “As do you.”
Sara doesn’t register my words. But Carmela settles the pad of paper she’s been thumbing back onto her desk. “Forces, you say?” She looks at me, her eyes twinkling malevolently. Intrigued at last. “How curious. And how can I be sure you two have not been possessed by these same ghouls and have come here now to harass me?”
I swallow hard, surprised by her taunt. “Because, Madame De Vaccaro,” I start, the courage in my words strengthening, expanding, and beating faster inside me, “we have come to tell you we will fight them and escape, with or without your help.”
I will admit: Glowing from my pronouncement, I expect her facade to dip. I hope she will reveal some scrap of knowledge. I pray she will explain herself.
But instead, peals of laughter burst from Carmela’s throat. Cruel, melodic laughter that contorts her face into an ugly and inhuman mask, all sharp angles and shadows. She laughs for what feels like a minute as my blood turns to ice, and Sara sits motionless beside her, betraying nothing.
She wipes tears from her eyes. “The soles were skinned from the feet of the members of this house long ago,” she says at last, an incredulous, condescending smile splitting her face. “How, exactly, would anyone fight, much less escape?”
In that moment, the room spins on its godless axis. The terror that engulfs me is as hot as scorched grease, and my face feels as if it has been burned off and hangs in mangled strips of half-melted flesh.
I remember the early days, when we playfully considered why Carmela started the school. Goat fur, we said. Subsidies. Oh, we were naive fools. Perhaps this has all been a sick experiment for Carmela to dabble in evil spirits. To conjure up a cohort, with us as the devil’s feed. Vaccaro means “cattle herder,” after all. Carmela has acted true to that name. She has herded us together like cattle, prepared us for an inevitable slaughter. But why? Why invite the inhuman power of the Others into this historic house? How can this be the legacy a powerful woman will accept? These are the words I wish to say, but I am bereft of speech in the moment, my mind a turbulent hive of stinging thoughts.
The candlelight flickers beneath Carmela’s chin, giving her shaded slits for eyes and craggy cheeks. “Now please see yourselves out and shut the door at once. I need some private time to clear my head and listen to the rain. It has a most pleasing sound after the shrillness of the last few weeks.”
As I gape at her, uncomprehending, Yesi drags me toward the door, and I stumble on my feet.
“Out,” she says once more as I hesitate, giving a last glance at Sara, whose eyes fail to recognize me even then.
Trembling, my traitorous body listens to Carmela. I find myself following Yesi out; she shuts the door quietly on this wicked woman and the poor, withered child she uses as a puppet.
I once believed Carmela wielded an inexplicable power over us that moved beyond class divisions and the employee-employer relationship. I called it charisma—an admirable confidence, even. But perhaps she gained this power from her dealings with the Others themselves.
This woman of endless competence is doing the devil’s work.
* * *
As if summoned by Carmela, the storm worsens; the wind cracks shutters, shoots metalwork off the roof, rips away tiles. Mariella, whom I never expected to see succumb to anything or anyone, drops off into sleep as she’s dabbing Gisella’s brow. Angel and I carry her onto a free cot: Not a single girl remains in good health.
“A doctor isn’t coming,” I whisper to Yesi and Angel, wringing a wet rag in my hands over a pail of murky water and draping it across snoring Mariella’s forehead. “A rescue boat isn’t coming. We need our own plan.”
We pace the sickroom, wiping the girls’ brows as suffocating terror builds and Morency knits an ugly gray scarf by the closed window.
“We must learn more about the sacrifice ritual,” Yesi whispers back with a glance at Morency’s looming, useless presence. She hands the two of us open cans of cold soup, then opens one for herself. “And to do that, we must find the tenth girl, once and for all.” She looks drained of all life as she dips her spoon into the soup.
“Who exactly do you believe this tenth girl to be?” interrupts Morency from her rocking chair perch. We all lurch to attention, and I glance at Yesi, then Angel, wondering just how much she has overheard as she glares at us. “It should be clear to you by now that there are rooms in this house to which you shall never be granted access, and suffice it to say that the tenth girl rests there comfortably.” And with that, she takes her knitting in hand and storms out of the sickroom. A cool draft follows her, blowing out a swath of lit candles, and we all shiver as we blink at one another in shock.
“Well,” Yesi whispers, setting her half-eaten can in her lap. “If that’s true, there’s only one miserable zone we’re prohibited from accessing.”
“The family’s quarters,” we say in unison.
“The same quarters we’ve trawled time and time again,” I add.
“But this time, we’ll bring the house down, if we have to,” says Angel.
Even in the candlelit dark, I can see his and Yesi’s sunken eyes flash. Defiance allows hope to burn a little more brightly inside us, warming us as we wait to be relieved of our sickroom duties.
Mole arrives shortly thereafter, sniffing at us oddly, then wordlessly sitting in the corner, scratching notes into a book with increasing fury. She hasn’t been quite the same ever since the sickroom opened. It reminds me that we cannot know when the remaining members of this house will fall. We cannot know who will be the next victim of possession. We only know it will happen. And the risk is so much greater during the perilous evening hours. Of course, without outside light, we have been pitched into endless night.
Mole watches us from afar, eyes hooded, as Yesi raises her empty can to ours, expression grim. “Cheers to tearing this decrepit house apart, one filthy stone at a time.”
26
ANGEL: 2020–2600
It might only be a coincidence. But after my fight with Charon, after Carmela shutters the house, the Others notice me, like sharks drawn to more concentrated blood in the water. When I enter the house through Mavi’s closet door, I barely have time to brace myself. The Others don’t bite—they don’t break. It’s worse. They focus their limited attention on the little hidey-hole where I keep myself outside of Dom, and they come for me all at once, extracting every bit of strength I gained from Yesi in threads, just as I pulled those stringlets from Yesi.
Imagine a miserable flu: the kind where you forget you were ever healthy, you’ve puked bile and the residue from ice chips and saltines for the tenth time, and it hurts too much to sit in bed, much less watch TV. It’s like that, except more active; little pieces of my being—whatever makes me exist here in this membrane of nothingness—are sucked out by a phantasmagoric vacuum. I don’t know what happens to those bits of my consciousness—I hope there aren’t bits of my soul floating inside someone’s crystal jambalaya body. I lie prone, too weak to fight back. And I think of the girls. If this is the agony they’re going through, I don’t blame them for gurgling in bed, flitting in and out of consciousness like terminal patients. To be punched and bitten and spat on would be better than this. I might still have the energy and state of mind to groan and cry and spit back and scream. For a regular human, injuries can be borne because you know—hope—your body will heal itself in time. Pain is brutal and disorienting, but not always a source of utter hopelessness. I think of Mama, who preserved the hope she might heal miraculously until she was so close to the end. Here in t
his universe, I don’t know what the deal is for the girls, but I lack the ability to heal. Because Others fight for energy, gaining and losing based on feedings alone.
This could be a fatal mistake I’ve made, messing with Charon and straying from the pack of Others. I can’t apologize to him, because every time I visit the cloud house, he’s napping and can’t be awakened—snoring so hard I suspect he’s faking it to blow me off. And I don’t know when the Others’ attention will drift.
I once thought that the poignant, everlasting effect of death was the total extinction of the self as a presence in the universe. Now I am not sure. Death might be nature swallowing your matter—some part of you remains, digested as it is, to nourish and give life to another life-form. Even if the other life-form is something like an Other.
I guess there are pros and cons to this kind of life. When I waste away, there won’t be any unseemly decay, no pus, no gore—no breaking down of the body. I won’t have a mangled body to leave behind as evidence of a struggle or an existence. I will disappear, like a vision blinked away.
I refuse to tell Mavi or Yesi. It’s no hero’s noble proclamation to say my troubles pale beside theirs. And this might come off as pathetic, but I guess a part of me also fears that Mav wouldn’t care much at all. Which is totally her prerogative, after the horror show I dragged her through.
Still, being with them is a bright pinhole shining in the darkness, the size of a flipped coin: a reminder I can’t lose all of myself, I can’t disappear in full, because then I can’t find the girl and, yes, help Mav. This urge to help hasn’t filled me since Mama and Rob died. It feels noble and shining to dedicate myself to helping her until I disappear—the King Arthur in Camelot.
When I experience a surge in energy—a minor respite from being sucked dry—a new solution occurs to my sluggish brain. If the Others know where I enter and exit the house, and target me there, I should figure out where they access it, too—maybe I can stop them from entering at all.
A simple realization follows: Every teacher’s room has its own closet. Every. Single. One. The girls’ rooms, too. I mean, okay, duh, but it could make sense as a unique—albeit obvious—entry point for every Other. I return to one of the closets in Morency’s room. She’s praying by the dying fireplace. I rest my crystalline hand on the flat wood of the closet door. Could it be that easy? I dart my head in, out. Only darkness.
But darkness is normal—darkness is a home for an eyeless soldier. I repeat the process I go through in Mavi’s closet. I feel a buzzing, a humming, a building hope that this may work.
But nothing happens at all.
* * *
The Others do get tired of feeding on froth, eventually—at least for the day. They leave me, and I float in a trancelike state to Dom. He lies stock-still on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, as if making sense of the constellations there. Constellations? I squint up: fruit flies. Drawn to the decay of the vegetable that is Dom.
Over the course of a few minutes, I press myself into him again. It’s comfortable, even if I lack the full abilities I once had, swinging his arms limply, failing to smile evenly. I won’t have much more time in him—this already feels borrowed. But I fix my eyes more closely on that bright spot, my pitiful nobility, the coin spiraling in space.
27
MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978
We creep through the winding damask halls together, Yesi, Angel, and I, then tiptoe through the crumbling corridors of stone, lit candles in hand. Their flickering light lends everything an antique look—furniture shadows tremble on the spongy burgundy carpet, and our own contours grow malformed appendages and odd lumps while our backs are turned. There is no doubt: We are the bits of cud washing between the house’s teeth. The floors shift beneath our feet, and not only because of the rotted planks—a hall that is claustrophobic and fetid in one moment becomes vaulted and drafty the next. While we hope to scrutinize every room in the family’s quarters, every nook, we cannot keep track of which corridors we’ve passed through and which we haven’t, because they all merge into one freakish house of mirrors. I tread through at least three versions of a sitting room in a row, the same shocked guanaco head mocking us over the unlit fireplace. I swear I hear the faintest throaty laughter, too, echoing around the chambers of my head. I run my finger along the dusty bar cart in the corner of the sitting room as I leave each time, only for the river of my finger’s touch to disappear.
“But didn’t we…?” I ask Angel, taking the bar cart’s brass handles in both hands before rubbing my eyes.
Yesi turns my shoulders back toward the door with her gentle child’s hands. “You mustn’t worry,” she says, as if she understands. “The house knows we’re tired, and it’s trying to be funny.”
Perhaps Morency was right: There are rooms I shall never be granted access to. Vaccaro School is an unholy maze with no exit and no relief. We pass an unreachable balcony and doors that open into a wall of bricks—bricks, in a house of stone! We rip open closet after closet, creating an informal inventory of each style of handle or knob, only to be met each time with an identical, random assortment of old woolen odds and ends. Hands heavy with blood, I tear the same mucus-green coat, the same vomit-yellow sweater off their hangers, scattering them on the closet floor in mulchy heaps until I must catch my breath. I drop to the ground and look at Yesi, who bites her lip. What’s worse: The racks of clothing conceal nothing. Not a single closet contains a false back, not even a hole fit for a mouse. There isn’t a forgotten coin, not a mothball, not a tangle of hair. I check the corners myself on my hands and knees, while the flames of the candles dance frantically and exhale desperate threads of smoke. Angel pulls me to my feet without a word. I am losing my mind: The house has been growing rooms as our backs are turned, I’m sure of it. It grows them like malignant tumors, these rooms, these physical bubbles of noxious memories from another era.
It is by an upstairs pantry that we succeed in finding an unsettling architectural quirk. Angel has passed the site every day on his way to every meal without noticing this: a tucked-away staircase, its entrance seamlessly integrated into the stone so as to become invisible. An optical illusion! I could leap out of my skin I’m so light-headed with joy. The staircase leads downward to a mezzanine level of the house we did not know existed. A giddiness fills the air at the prospect of a concrete discovery; Yesi’s irises are wild above her solitary flame, in frightening contrast with the indigo-colored bags under her eyes. Could a girl be waiting here, somewhere beneath our feet?
Angel presses a finger to his lips and descends cautiously, as if heavy footfalls might scare her away. We follow, hearts in our throats. At the bottom of the stairs, we press on into the darkness and find ourselves before a wall of stone, thickly grouted and impenetrable. I feel for edges, for knobs, for latches. I kick at the slabs and massage them with equal enthusiasm.
“Please,” I whisper, begging it to allow me forward. I put all my weight into the stone, and I swear I feel it yield for a moment.
But there is no exit here. We must spend an hour rubbing every seam, and this hopeless work puts me on the verge of tears. When I do groan, Yesi nips the skin on my wrist with her fingers in silent warning, and we tramp away.
Angel pulls me up a set of stairs—at its base, before it had rotted away, I hid from Domenico all those weeks ago and heard him tell the empty hallway he was hollow inside. Perhaps he knew of the Others. I squeeze Yesi’s hand—I can hear her doll-size feet dragging beside me. She hesitates on the last step.
“We’ve done enough for tonight,” she mutters, releasing my hand. “We’ll be trapped here for who knows how many days in this storm. I might as well—I might as well sleep.”
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. It might be the image of the girls, snug in their beds, dead to the world for half days at a time. I still don’t want to sleep, bleary-eyed as I am. I thought Yesi wouldn’t want to, either. Sleep here is as close to insensate death as is possible in this world.
I look at Angel, whose fast-blinking eyes reflect the desperation and alertness I still feel. There are these silent moments of communion with him that make me wonder if he truly is an angel, if I am ruined, or if we are both.
“Go on, then, Yesi,” I say, for the both of us. Of course I don’t want to leave her alone, this little fairy of a creature before me, all silver hair and heavy-lidded blue eyes. But she is the safest of us all, in her way. Even if she invites them in, she won’t be any worse for wear. She gives me a limp hug and floats back off into the darkness.
Angel takes my hand, and we move on. The trouble is, we have nowhere left to go—well, almost nowhere. The only spot we keep returning to, unable to understand its access points in the dark, are two strange landings on a corner of the upper floor of the family’s quarters. As we stand on one landing, we can see the other, separated from us by a balustrade and a steep drop to the ground floor. It’s an architectural prank—a logical person’s nightmare. Without a bridge, who could access the landing across from ours?
“Have you ever been over there?” I ask Angel. “In Dom or…?” The landing is bare but for two doors. One leads God knows where inside the building. The other, a strangely knobless door, must lead outside the building itself. Two doors we cannot reach.
He shakes his head. “Too bad we can’t jump across,” he says. You’d have to be a deer to manage the leap. I have a vision of throwing the deer head over my shoulders and bounding across. Who’s to say any rules of human life still apply at Vaccaro School? When one pillar of your existence is shattered, you’re free to question the solidity of all the others, as you like. Surely the tenth girl would find the sight of my trying the jump amusing, after her dive onto the ice before Angel.
Being separated from the rest of the household in such a way would suit the girl—and it would match Morency’s description of an inaccessible corner. Angel peeks down into the wide abyss again—he can sense where my chain of thoughts leads. It is a fall to snap necks.