by Julia Fine
Peter knows that his behaviors warrant this punishment. Stuck here alone, Peter has no escape from the accusations flung at him by the stranger his daughter has become. Her words reverberate, sticking to the walls of his mind, rankling. What more suitable fate for a man who has tried to own a body—for now Peter acknowledges the tests, the rules he imposed on his daughter, as such—than the confinement of his own? This is the natural conclusion of his studies, a clever response from the forest and the women that it breeds, the women who have taken his daughter. He wonders what they have done to her.
He has a sudden vision of Maisie as a young girl—how she’d tug at his hand, those gardening gloves floppy around her tiny wrists, and lead him to an object of her childhood fascination: a tree with a twisted trunk, a squirrel without a tail, an old arrowhead. She’d looked up at him with such innocence, such trust. She’d been so helpless, unaware of her burgeoning power. She had needed him. And what had he seen when he looked at her? What had Peter needed? A testing site? A key?
If she ever returns to the clearing, what Maisie has become will look at him with her strange, altered eyes; her girlhood gone, and with it all small wonders. Whatever Maisie had been, what she might have been, Peter believes he has ruined. He presses his forehead against the wall of wood and cries for all that they have lost.
23
I made my offerings—a whining chipmunk, a house cat with a large, puffed tail, a little lamb. I ate all that Coulton offered me to regain my strength. I paced my small room, planning, preparing for whatever might come next, hoping for some chance at escape.
I guessed it had been three weeks since my encounter with the first beast, and I’d just finished battling a monstrous red fox. The thing was evil, vicious as a bull shark, its skinny body scurrying and scratching until I finally touched the white tip of its tail. Coulton had shuffled into my compartment to remove the body. Once he’d bagged the fox, he nodded his usual, silent goodbye, and I thought myself alone for the evening.
But on this particular night, the door opened shortly after Coulton had left. I sat straight up from my cot, body tense, to see Rafe in the doorframe. I’d given up on him weeks ago, yet there he was in front of me, dressed in his white jumpsuit, fully covered but for his face, which grinned rakishly, charming as ever. His audacity infuriated me.
“May I?” Rafe asked me, hand extended toward my blankets. Like an animal I recoiled from him instinctively. “Maisie,” Rafe said.
At first I thought to freeze him out, refuse to look his way, ignore what explanation he provided. But my current situation was unchanging. Perhaps I could use this encounter to my advantage. I turned around.
“What do you want?” I said softly.
A smile played carefully across his lips. “I know that you’re angry with me.”
I blinked at him.
“I know that this is not what you’d imagined when we set out on our quest.”
I said nothing. He stood, looking down at me, hands hidden in his pockets. His mouth twisted. He sighed. “I could have gone about it differently, I suppose. But Maisie, all that has happened—I hope you recognize it’s necessary, all of it. We’d undone the locks, we needed the last sacrifice. It was so clear you’d been conditioned, your father taught you not to touch anything, not to talk about what you can do. You would never have believed, wouldn’t have let me take the blood—I couldn’t risk it.”
“Oh, come off it,” I said. “Like there was ever any reason to run me all around to special places, to pretend you cared about my father or his work. Who are you selling my blood to? What are they paying you?”
“Maisie,” Rafe said, “I do care. Trust me—”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
Rafe pulled his hands slowly from his pockets. I couldn’t help but flinch.
“We have the same purpose,” he said slowly. “To know the forest, to enter it and understand the wood. My whole life, well, since I began this line of research, I’ve been waiting for you. At first I didn’t know it was you, precisely, but when I realized that your father was not only Peter Cothay, when I realized that he had you . . . I’m sure you understand the stakes, why I had no other options. I couldn’t risk your disagreeing, couldn’t risk your saying no. Your blood is the only way in. I’m sure of it.” He paused, as if waiting for me to absolve him. I wondered what he’d say if he learned I had already entered that wood without shedding a single drop of blood.
“Why are you here?” I asked, scowling. “Have you come back to see your handiwork? To gloat?”
Rafe seemed surprised. “Maisie, the plan didn’t work,” he said. “I thought you’d already know. The door hasn’t opened. I sat by that forest for weeks waiting, and I know we had the right amount of blood—we had more than enough, more than a body’s worth—so I can only imagine that you have to be there with me. That there’s something about you, about your presence. That there’s something else we’ve missed.”
“My presence?” I laughed harshly.
“I figured you’d have had a sense . . . a vision . . . ,” Rafe continued. “Don’t you have any intuition? Anything at all?” He stepped closer, so that I could smell his cologne. Again, he smiled.
I turned away from him to stare at the burrow I’d made in the wall, my eyes trained on the flaking plaster. “You must think I’m even stupider than I seem.”
“I understand,” Rafe said to my back. “You’re still angry. But Maisie, you’re a miracle of science. You shouldn’t be ashamed, you should be proud. When your father talked about the forest, about its history, was there ever any—”
“You’re wasting your breath.”
“Because you don’t know, or because you won’t tell me?”
I said nothing.
Rafe sighed. “Eventually I’m going to figure out what it is that went wrong. I’ll be back in a day or so. While I’m gone, I hope you’ll think about all you could gain if you help me. Think about all I can give you.” He set a gloved hand on my shoulder. I jerked away. “By the time I get back,” said Rafe slowly, “I’m sure that you’ll have reconsidered your involvement.” He left the room, bolting the door behind him.
I sat very still, processing Rafe’s sudden arrival, his equally sudden departure.
When my captivity had begun, I’d taken comfort in the thought that I knew Rafe, that I could not have sat so close for hours in the car and not seen some glimmer of truth. I had replayed our conversations, reading layers of meaning where there likely were none, turning phrases like rocks to search the soil underneath them. And I’d realized this exercise was futile. My analysis of Rafe’s character could be built only on our most recent encounters, any previous behavior necessarily regarded as a part of his well-embodied act. I hadn’t known his motives then, but now I saw them clearly: he cared only for his work, and he was willing to excuse whatever torture, whatever cruelty, to achieve its completion. Those stories he’d told me about entering the forest, of sacrifice . . . did he truly believe them? Did he truly believe what he had said to me? That he meant well? That his choices were moral?
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Well-meaning or not, Rafe had sentenced me to prison; he had been my judge and my jury and my crime. I would not succumb to his body, or his stories. I would not let him take more blood. I’d remain cold and watchful, and I’d kill him if he came again, would lunge toward that unprotected face, that warm, bare skin.
THE NEXT DAY I left the basement for the first time since my capture. Coulton ushered me up some stairs into a different, darker room, windowless and bleak, and placed me in a chair that leaned forward and back. He strapped me in with metal ties that scraped against my skin, then left me to wait, the anticipation its own torture.
I tried to predict what was coming. I thought it sure to be some sort of forced revival, that he’d bring me something dead and have me stroke it back to life. Might he film me? Bring an audience? Or was this what Rafe had meant when he’d insisted that I’d soon reconside
r his offer?
Finally, Coulton reentered. He stood before me, eyes gleaming.
“Don’t worry”—he smiled—“this will only hurt a moment. We have to keep you fit, don’t we? Our dear little sister. Our unending chest of gold.”
As he spoke, he prepared his instruments: large, shiny hooks, an oversized magnifying glass, a straight razor that gleamed with brackish light. He slid his hands into a pair of form-fitting rubber gloves, smacking their cuffs against his wrists, and loaded the barrel of a needle with a plum-colored fluid. Involuntarily, I shuddered.
“This will only hurt a moment,” he said again. I clenched my teeth against my lip. Coulton tied a band around my poor, abused right arm and plunged the purple liquid into my vein.
Slowly, the plunger’s contents took effect. My ankle, which had developed a constant twinge since an encounter two days prior with a feral-looking ferret, no longer pained me. The thumbnail I had bitten to the quick before he’d tied me to the chair stopped the brutal, rhythmic throbbing that kept time to Coulton’s words. My body felt light and effervescent, a shell I had found temporary solace in, rather than fully part of me.
With detachment I observed as Coulton took his lancet and carved an inch-long gash into my left forearm. The movement tickled, but didn’t hurt. Funny, I thought then, just how delicate my body. How utterly, embarrassingly human.
Look how the blood trickles and pools as Coulton peels away the skin. Look at the swollen pinkness underneath it. How clean it is. How strong.
Once he’d lifted up a sizable square of the skin at the top of my forearm, Coulton used a pair of scissors to cut the peeled part free. He placed his relic on a silver tray beside him, then carried it carefully out.
My arm, bleeding freely, was now twitching. It felt very far away. And then a fire lit my body in a sudden, painful burst. Its onslaught sent me jerking forward, so that the metal ties constraining me cut into my chest. I screamed. As consciousness faded, I noticed that the blood had stained my dress, forming teardrops of red against the dirty white.
24
I dreamed myself back in the clearing where Marlowe had buried the shinbone, walking with great purpose yet unable to name my destination. Although I was sleeping, I felt awake in a way that I had not been before, aware of the world and its wideness. The scene was strange, but did not feel strange. Of course my movements should be guided by some distant, shimmering magnet, a reeling that I felt within my heart, pulling me closer toward . . . I paused, the intensity frightening as I considered my burgeoning bloodlust.
I’d never worried about evil. I’d read tales of horror and found them too elaborate and glamorous, strewn with apparitions, doomed lovers, mysterious curses. Such scintillations were a joke. There was no silver-blooded sexuality about death; there was only the fact of it—the way that it went with the earth. The power I had felt as I’d confronted each new animal was no demon possession—it was me. Each desire that compelled me was mine. If this was true, where was I going? What would I find?
Some questions are birthed, rather than asked, and having been born they will cry until tended. I knew the story of Pandora’s box. I knew the cost of Eve tasting the apple. I didn’t care. I was led by my desire.
“Maisie.” I jumped to hear my father.
“Peter?” I stood in the forest, looking at him as if I’d just peeked in his office door.
“Maisie, my girl,” said Peter. He was not standing before me, and yet I could see him, the way he’d turn back from the desk in his office, that circle of glass at his eyes, an eyebrow raised above it. Have you come with the tea?
“Maisie?”
I kept walking.
“Maisie!”
ONE MIGHT THINK that with my powers of resurgence I’d be quick to recover from physical harm, but to my constant frustration, that had never been the case. My scraped knees required the same time as anyone else’s to regenerate skin. When I broke my arm at seven (a silly story involving a desperate attempt to hush an inconsolable wren by offering a bit of bread out of a window, all the while trying to keep my arm off the tree), I had to wait the full six weeks for it to heal.
I was suffering from a square inch of excoriated skin, a gruesome patch on the inside of my arm below my elbow. Any sudden movement seemed sure to disturb the clotting process. I winced at my makeshift bandage, grimacing at the grimy floors of the basement I knew all too well, the rusted, dirty chains that reappeared around my ankle, the steady dripping of old water from the ceiling. A headache was hammering through the edges of my skull.
I felt a spasm crawling up my chest, summoned my strength, and sat up, releasing all the contents of my stomach. My sick splashed across my blanket, my cot. It stained my paper gown and seeped onto my bandage. The pain in my arm was an inevitable constant, and I felt a throbbing tightness in my stomach, as if my bowels were getting ready to release. Still, the headache and the dizziness seemed to have passed.
A sudden image in my mind: Coulton’s hands across my body. My strip of skin, pink and pulsing. The way he held it to the light as if a conquest, a lens through which his life would change. My abdomen curled again. I shuddered, wet dress clinging to my skin. What if Rafe were to come down here now and see me so pathetic? Surely he’d at least replace my clothing, rinse my cot. So far he had granted the most basic human dignities: a bucket of hot water weekly to bathe myself, food, the lovely drugs that helped me sleep. If he needed my blood, he needed me alive. He needed to know that, despite my appearance, I would stay alive. If I died or took sick, his past few months would be for nothing. I thought of Coulton’s words: We have to keep you fit. If I was seriously ill, what would they do?
It was a gamble, I knew, to even contemplate the question. I poked at my bandage, and the pressure of my fingers sent a darkness to my brain so extreme that I was sure I would be sick again. Would vomit be enough? I didn’t think so. They’d give me a shot of something, another sedative. What I needed was to frighten Rafe so much that he’d immediately remove me, not only call for help but carry me off to a hospital. Once I was there, in an emergency room, in some country doctor’s office, in his van . . . One thing at a time.
My stomach cramped with my decision, tightening and pulsing. I spit on the fingers of my right hand to clean them, my mouth still sour and dry. Pulling up a corner of my bandage, I gagged at the pus. I had to time this correctly. An artery, once found, would bleed out fast. I couldn’t let myself lose consciousness. I sat very still and listened for any sign of movement up above. I had no way to mark the time. How much had passed? Thirty minutes? Three hours?
Then, sound at the top of the stairs. Distant voices.
Bracing myself, my front teeth sharp against my lip, I pressed my fingernail deep into the mess of my injury. The pain was so immense that the room seemed to seesaw. I felt a sticky rush of wetness pooling under me, and was grimly pleased to note that my incontinence would only help my cause. Shifting myself slightly, I prepared to dive again into the abyss of my wound, when I saw the patch of color slowly seeping, turning my gray hospital gown red.
Blood.
Not from my arm, which was producing its own hot seep of infection, but blood from my insides. Deep, thick clots. A flood.
THERE WAS DISGRACE, I had been taught (by books, of course—Peter had never broached the subject, and Mrs. Blott just frowned at me and said I’d learn in time), to monthly bleeding. Menstruation meant uncleanliness. Blood was shameful. It was excess, embarrassing, an obvious sign of sin. And yet I never loved my sinful body more than in that moment, when it delivered me precisely what I needed: both a tangible tool by which to save my own life, and the promise of a future as a woman, a reason to live it.
A quiet current of pride had always run beneath the deep shame of my body: that although I was a monster, I was special. Matthew’s attention had strengthened this conviction, as, in a twisted way, had Rafe’s. But all at once I saw that pride for what it truly was—a buttress to prevent me from entirely collap
sing. I wanted so much to be normal. I wanted to build, rather than conquer, and I’d resigned myself to the fact that I never would.
For the first time in weeks, I felt myself smile.
I WAS READY when Rafe came inside with Coulton. They were mid-conversation, Rafe frustrated and Coulton contrite.
“I didn’t know it wouldn’t work before I sliced it off, now did I?” he panted, having raced after Rafe, who’d paid no mind to their disparate states of physical fitness. “And if it had worked, just imagine—”
“Shut up.” Rafe’s voice was very quiet. “Maisie?” He took two slow steps toward where I lay splayed on my cot. “Fuck.”
My eyes were closed, but with some pride I could imagine the scene that they’d walked into: my naked body curled toward the door, bandaged wrist stretched out to rest precisely on the red stain on my mattress, the bandage itself nearly soaked through. The drying vomit on my lips, the blood like war paint smeared across my right cheekbone, the clumps of my tangly hair. And my pièce de résistance, the slow trickle of the sopping, bloody dress I’d torn and hidden in my left hand, squeezing gently, each drop pooling to the floor.
“Fuck. What did you do to her?”
“I told you, just a quick bit off her arm and then—”
“She’s going to need a doctor. Where can we take her? Fuck. Fuck.” I heard the rip of cloth, Rafe tearing up the T-shirt that he wore under his jumpsuit, and felt his gloved hands tie a tourniquet above my sopping bandage. It took all I had in me not to scream from the pain.
“Maybe a military doctor. The military hospital . . . we could say that we just found her. We would have to clean this up. For God’s sake go get the van. Go get her something to wear.”
“Or we could chalk it all up to bad luck. Could be kinder now to let her bleed out. And when her body’s still, we—”
“Go!” Rafe roared. He followed Coulton out, the two huffing up the stairs, leaving the basement door open. I opened an eye—was now the time? Not yet, the chain was on my ankle. But soon.