I almost walk in. Take a seat on the bed next to her. Hold her while she cries. We could talk about it.
I pull back. No. I can’t put that on her, or anyone. I can’t tell any of them what I know. Or maybe it’s the other way around—I can’t not tell them. I can’t add to their grief by telling them Elle is dead. I can’t prolong their grief by letting them live in uncertainty longer than they have to.
I get dressed again in my room, then stand there, unable to make a decision. I stare at Jane’s bed. The thrown-back covers. It should still be warm from where she just left it, but I know it would be cold to the touch.
Out the window, out in the forest, a swarm of lightning bugs flash their glowing abdomens and wait.
I’m trying not to think about the thing that must be thought about. I’m pushing it aside with cleaning and first aid and memories of anything except what must be thought about.
Maybe I should go back out the tunnel and—what, escape? Abscond. Good word. But you can’t just abscond, can you? You abscond with things. I could abscond with my heart. My hope.
My life.
I can’t sleep, so I pace. But then I have to stop pacing, because the adrenaline is gone and my legs are making it clear they’re sore. I try to sit at my desk, but I can’t stop bouncing my leg, and the chair is creaky, and what if one of my siblings hears?
I can’t think about it.
I grab my math workbook and get in bed with my book light. I try to concentrate on permutations, but it doesn’t make much sense to me even when Elle explains it, and now I’m thinking about Elle again, and—
There’s nothing to stop it anymore. I lie in bed, hands folded tight over my stomach where Elle’s wound was.
Where the blood was, clotted, congealing.
Old.
Too old for Elle to have been calling my name.
But if it wasn’t Elle in the forest, then what was using her voice?
If it was whatever magic I’ve been communing with in the forest, if it can mimic voices in that way, then it makes the question even worse. It forces me to ask if I really heard Jane in the forest begging me to find her, or if that was a trick.
And if the forest can mimic voices—the more I think about it, the more I’m certain it can, even if I don’t want to believe it—then can it make a person feel things? The kind of thing that draws them out of their homes in the middle of the night?
The kind of thing that makes them feel so, so certain that their missing sisters aren’t dead, just lost.
I should have already been questioning everything I saw in the forest, with Claire being . . . whatever she is. She said I don’t need to make the distinction between a real girl named Claire and the forest, but it has to be made, doesn’t it? If I’m ever going to know what’s real.
I swallow down bile and close my eyes tight against the epiphany—good word, light on the tongue, nothing like the weight it’s placed on me—that reality is . . . what’s another good word?
Malleable.
I sleep fitfully. I dream the same dream over and over. I walk into the time-out room, and one of my siblings is there, crying. I hug them. I rip out their throat with my teeth. I wake up—or, I think I do. But I’m not really awake, because when I manage to get out of bed, I’m back at the door of the time-out room, and the next sibling is there, and I rip out their throat. Blood sprays and I spit flesh onto the floor.
It takes me a long time after waking to detach from the dream. I’m certain that in a moment I’ll be tasting blood again. I work my consciousness through each limb and breathe into my stomach.
I’m awake.
The sun is rising. My alarm clock reads 6:47. Elle had the earliest alarm, at seven. In thirteen minutes, it’ll wake Irene up, reminding her all over again that her twin is missing.
I stay in bed for as long as I can. I want to cling to each minute I have left before I see Irene and have to look her in the face, and not tell her what I know. I wait until Violet comes in, hair ruffled from sleep, grumbling that Brooke said to call me down for breakfast.
The day feels like a blur. It’s like I’m not even the one living it. My limbs move and I talk, but it’s all on autopilot.
Frank’s patience is short, more than usual. Everyone’s quiet while we eat, which makes Frank ask what’s wrong with us, but when we try to talk to each other, he turns the page of his newspaper with a snap that sounds like a whip. We can’t do anything right today. Violet gets time-out when they trip at breakfast and break a plate. I end up in time-out right after them, because Frank thought I was ignoring him when I was zoning out.
That grief-fueled autopilot mode becomes a temporary blessing. I still close my eyes against the lights and cover my ears, but I can leave my body and suffer a little less.
I remember my first time-out. Frank got a quick handle on what would screw with me. Most of us, when we get here, raid his selection of night-lights and white noise machines and music boxes. Most of my siblings need gentle noise and light to get to sleep.
Not me. I cut a big strip off an old T-shirt and wrapped it around my eyes at night. For sound, I’m fine. I like the ambient noise of the house and of the forest beyond it. If there was more, I might run into issues, but the house at night is often the perfect level of quiet I need to sleep.
My first big offense was questioning Frank too much. I’d been there a couple of weeks, and wanted to know where my parents were, and why they left me here, and why couldn’t I ever leave? Couldn’t I go outside? What about the rest of my family? I had aunts and uncles—none that I knew very well, but maybe they missed me, even if my parents didn’t.
I never got in much trouble at home. Even when I did, my parents weren’t big on punishments. They’d lecture and help me understand why what I’d done was wrong, but otherwise believed that the guilt I felt was often punishment enough. They were right.
When Frank walked me down the hall to the time-out room for the first time, I was crying before I even understood what was happening. The lights and humming changed until I was all-out sobbing, and then he left me there. For fifteen minutes, he left me.
My legs shook when I came out of the time-out room. Frank was there, smiling at me. That night, he presented me with a sleep mask that would block out all the light.
There’s no reward waiting for me at the end of this time-out. Just Frank, still scowling, still unsatisfied. I wonder if this is just what he’s like when his golden girl isn’t around to placate him, but I don’t think so. I was in this house three years before the big twins arrived. Frank had bad days, but he was mostly just Frank.
Today, it’s something else.
I float on through the rest of the day. I know that I make conversation, but I can’t remember any of it. I don’t know what we have for dinner. I don’t fully register anything I do until I’m back in the forest.
The ground is dry now. The slightly cooler temperatures brought by the rain are long gone. It’s a muggy summer night.
Elle is where I left her. Claire, too. She’s kneeling next to my dead sister, gazing at her face. Claire’s expression is as inscrutable as ever.
I’m scared, at first, to get too close. Thanks to—well, Elle—I know about decomposition. I know that a body left to the elements doesn’t necessarily last long. I know what animals do to bodies. There’s a good word for it, something Elle taught me. I can’t remember what it is.
For all that I have gruesome, bloody dreams and urges, I don’t want to see my sister with the soft tissues of her face nibbled away by scavengers. I don’t want to see her skin mottled with decay.
I wish I still had that detachment from the rest of the day. It would make it so, so much easier to just look. The more I don’t look and know for sure, the worse my imagination gets.
It’s when I start worrying about what could have gotten into her wound that I finally step forward, determined to banish those images with certainty.
She looks . . . the same. I kneel across from Claire and examine El
le. Her eyes are still open and glassy, but they’re also still there. Same for her lips and her cheeks. If Elle’s books were right, they should have been among the first to go. Her skin still has that blueish cast, but there’s none of the bruising and mottling from settled blood that Elle described.
She’s still undeniably dead, but another day in the forest hasn’t changed her.
That doesn’t seem right.
Claire offers no answers, and I don’t ask for any. I just cry. Every time I try to look at Claire, I remember Elle’s voice calling to me when Elle was already dead. I don’t know who or what Claire really is. I’m not ready to find out.
I’m not ready the next night, either. Another day passes in that same blur. I think I did chores? If I concentrate, I remember doing dishes, and I remember navigating around the pile of Frank’s dirty clothes still sitting in the basement while I helped the little twins with laundry. There’s a memory of a flavor on my tongue. I think dinner was something with lemon.
But none of that feels entirely real. It was time I had to navigate to reach the place that actually matters. I only came alive when I reached the forest.
It’s been another twenty-four hours, and Elle is still the same. She’s the same the night after that, too. I know by then that it’s not normal. Something should be happening to her body.
“Are you keeping her like this?” I ask. It feels like sacrilege to speak after so many nights of silence. Claire and I make eye contact, briefly, just long enough for her to shrug. “I appreciate it, if you are.” I don’t know if I’m talking to Claire or the forest.
I still don’t know if Claire and the forest are the same thing.
Some nights, my creature joins us. I kneel with Claire and it stands behind us. It rests a wooden hand on my head. I think it’s trying to comfort me. I don’t know if it understands why I need comforting, but the action still brings tears to my eyes.
Every night, my walk out of the forest is half a second longer, because every night, there are new young trees.
Then the fifth night.
17
“I lived in that house,” Claire says. We’ve been quiet for so long that it startles me.
“What?”
“Before you. Before the alchemists, before that. Before those alchemists, and before those alchemists, on and on, I lived there, with my sisters.” Her voice hitches and she clears her throat. Some kind of reflexive movement, an echo of a living body. The difference in her speech is startling. She talks like a completely normal living human. “And Frank.”
“I don’t understand. There were alchemists before us?”
“Quite a few. You’ve been a long cycle, though. Ten years since Jane came, wasn’t it?” Claire sighs, almost dreamily. “My sisters and I lasted for six. I was only here for four of those years, though.”
Nothing she’s saying is making any sense. “But how long ago was that? You can’t have lived with Frank. He’s not that old.” When I met him for the first time, I remember thinking it made sense he was friends with my parents, because he seemed to be around their age. They were around thirty, I think, and it’s been seven years, so he’s probably not more than forty. I could buy him raising one group of alchemists before us, but Claire was making it sound like there had been . . . a lot.
“It would be more accurate to say he doesn’t seem that old,” Claire says. “I think you already know that not everything is as it seems.” Her gaze drifts to Elle. “Not everything is as it should be.”
“I don’t understand,” I say again, but this time it’s half a whisper, mostly to myself.
“Once upon a time, there was a quiet lake ringed by a magic forest,” Claire says. “And then a man came, and he built a house.”
Frank built the lake house? It seems ludicrous. There’s something about buildings—houses especially—that makes it seem like they’ve always been there, or like they’ve been grown. Architecture springing up from the ground.
“When the house was done, he brought two girls to live with him. They were magic, too. They called themselves witches, but the man said that was a bad word. A silly word. Hardly worthy of the science they were going to do here. He called them alchemists. He found a way to tie their magic to glass tethers. The first ones lived for . . . three years, I think. He harvested what he could, reset, and brought more. Five that time, and for five years. Again, the harvest. Again, the resetting.”
“What do you mean, harvest?”
Claire doesn’t seem to hear me. Or if she does, she ignores me. “It continued like that for five more cycles. Then a princess arrived.” She glances my way, winks at me, and whispers, “I’m the princess in this one.”
She clears her throat and continues. “The princess, like all the other girls in the house, had magic powers. Almost anything she could imagine, she could create out of thin air. It wasn’t always permanent, or solid, especially not when she first arrived. But the man trained her and trained her, until she could have conjured up a—a whale, or her own castle.” Claire pauses. Then, softer: “Or an escape from the house that the man would never know was there.”
She reaches out and passes her hand across Elle’s face as if she’s brushing hair away. Elle’s hair doesn’t move at all. Claire’s hand might as well have been nothing.
“But the princess couldn’t leave without her sisters, and by the time preparations were complete, it was too late. The man used the glass tethers attached to the alchemists to take their magic. It flowed into him like lifeblood. Which means, of course, that it flowed out of the alchemists just the same. He took, and he took, and he took, until there was nothing left and the princess’s sisters were all dead. She ran into the forest but she couldn’t run far enough. He caught her.” Claire moves a hand to her throat. “He wasn’t able to take the princess’s magic, but he took her life all the same.”
“Frank killed you,” I say in a horrified whisper.
Claire smiles.
The ghost of Claire smiles.
The world feels both too big and too small all at once. My vision narrows into a pinprick, but all around me is a wide world of shadows, and they all have Frank’s face. Frank, who protects us, who raised us when our families abandoned us like trash. Frank, who makes us hurt each other in the name of tests we’ll never truly pass. Frank, who knows we’ll never step too far out of line. Who needs us to stay in line for . . . for harvesting.
“He killed you,” I say again. “He killed more than just you. Do you”—I swallow, and make myself look at my dead sister’s face—“Do you know what happened to Elle?”
Now, finally, Claire gives me the answers I wasn’t yet ready to hear.
“I only saw the end. I saw Frank place her right here. She wasn’t quite gone yet. She held on for a long time. She kept trying to heal herself, but she was weak from blood loss.” I press my hand to my stomach, to the spot matching Elle’s wound, and swallow hot bile. I picture Elle, pale, bleeding out into the forest, crying, needing someone to save her. “He had to smother her eventually. He must have thought she’d bleed out on her own, and she would have, given even a couple more hours. I suppose he got impatient.”
“And you didn’t do anything?” I demand.
Claire casts me a scornful look.
“You could have come to get me—”
“I can’t leave the forest. It’s grown—I’m sure you’ve noticed—but it hasn’t grown far enough for me to come to you. Only Frank knew she was here.” She returns her gaze to Elle’s body. “He came back. He spent a long time out here, pacing and pacing.” She laughs. “I think he almost felt guilty! He kept asking her, Why did you make me do that? It was more anger than guilt, of course. Anger that he’d already lost two from this batch in a manner completely beyond his control or knowledge, and then anger that he had to dispose of another too early and so unceremoniously.”
It’s too much. I turn away from her, from Elle, onto my hands and knees. I throw up. I’m left gasping for air, with a so
ur taste in my mouth. Eventually I’m able to roll back into a seated position next to Claire.
“Did he . . . did he say why?”
Claire shakes her head. “I think she discovered something she shouldn’t have. I can only think of a few things that he’d kill her to keep secret, but I can’t imagine how she would have learned them. He still doesn’t allow anyone in his rooms, does he?”
“No, but . . . Elle was his favorite.” Claire raises her eyebrows, alarmed. “No, no. Not like that. I just mean—if he would trust anyone to come into his rooms, it would be her.”
“If he did let her in, she could have seen something.”
“What could be worth killing her over?”
Claire’s crooked smile. “The same thing he killed all of us for. Immortality.”
“Immortality,” I echo. “You’re telling me that we’re just trapped here? He can kill us, but we can’t do anything to him.”
“I didn’t say that. Immortality isn’t the same as invincibility. He’s spent a century stealing lives out of alchemists, but he can be hurt. He can bleed. He can die.”
There’s something wild and altogether too intoxicating in Claire’s voice. I remember the dream I had where I tore out the throats of my siblings, and imagine that Frank is in their place instead. For a fleeting moment I almost taste copper.
I taste blood because it got on my hands when we shoved him into the ground, and I wiped my face without thinking—
I pull myself away from the memory, heart racing. No. I’m not back there. I’m here, with Elle, and with Claire—maybe. I look at her and she’s still wearing that crooked smile, almost like someone hit pause on her remote.
“What are you?” I ask. “Tell me the truth, please, for once. Are you Claire, or are you the forest?”
“Does it matter?”
“It makes a difference!”
“Why? Either I’m the ghost of a girl who died in this forest, or I’m the projection of the ghost of a girl who died in this forest. I’d still be the same dead girl.”
“But if you’re a projection, then you could be anything. Maybe a girl named Claire really died here, and the forest took her face and made you. And if you’re just something the forest made, then everything you said about Frank could have been made up.”
A Dark and Starless Forest Page 16