by L. J. Smith
“Is she hurting anybody? Isobel?” Bonnie heard herself ask as they crossed through the kitchen and toward a bedroom at the end of the hallway.
She could hardly hear Jim’s whispered, “Yeah.”
And then, as Bonnie groaned internally, he added, “Herself.”
Isobel’s room was just what you’d expect from a quiet and studious girl. At least one side was. The other side looked as if a tidal wave had picked everything up and thrown it down again randomly. Isobel was sitting in the middle of this mess like a spider on a web.
But that wasn’t what made Bonnie’s gut churn. It was what Isobel was doing. She had laid out beside her what looked a lot like Mrs. Flowers’ kit for cleaning out wounds, but she wasn’t healing anything.
She was piercing herself.
She had already done her lip, her nose, one eyebrow, and her ears, many times. Blood was dripping from all these places, dripping and falling onto the unmade sheets of her bed. Bonnie saw all that as Isobel looked up at them with a frown, except that the frown was only half there. On the pierced side, the eyebrow didn’t move at all.
Her aura was shattered orange with black lashings through it.
Bonnie knew, all at once, that she was going to be sick. She knew it with the deep knowledge that overcame all embarrassment and which sent her flying to a wastebasket she didn’t even remember seeing. Thank God, it had a white plastic bag lining it, she thought, and then she was completely occupied for a few minutes.
Her ears recorded a voice, even as she was thinking she was glad she hadn’t had lunch.
“My God, are you crazy? Isobel, what have you done to yourself? Don’t you know the kind of infections you can get…the veins you can hit…the muscles you can paralyze…? I think you’ve already pierced the muscle in your eyebrow—and you shouldn’t still be bleeding unless you’ve hit veins or arteries.”
Bonnie retched dryly into the wastebasket, and spat.
And just then she heard a meaty thud.
She looked up, half knowing what she would see. But it still was a shock. Meredith was doubled over from what must have been a punch in the stomach.
The next thing Bonnie knew, she was beside Meredith. “Oh, my God, did she stab you?” A stab wound…deep enough into the abdomen…
Meredith clearly couldn’t get her breath. From somewhere a bit of advice from her sister Mary, the nurse, floated into Bonnie’s mind.
Bonnie pounded with both fists on Meredith’s back, and suddenly Meredith took a huge gulp of air.
“Thanks,” she was saying weakly, but Bonnie was already dragging her away, away from the laughing Isobel and a collection of the world’s longest nails and the rubbing alcohol and other things that she had on a breakfast tray beside her.
Bonnie got to the door and almost collided with Jim, who had a wet washcloth in his hand. For her, she supposed. Or maybe for Isobel. All Bonnie was interested in was making Meredith pull up her top to make absolutely, positively sure that there were no holes in her.
“I got it—out of her hand—before she punched me,” Meredith said, still breathing painfully as Bonnie anxiously scanned the area above her low-rise jeans. “I’ll have a bruise, that’s all.”
“She hit you, too?” Jim said in dismay. Except that he didn’t say it. He whispered it.
You poor guy, Bonnie thought, finally satisfied that Meredith wasn’t perforated. What with Caroline and your sister Tami and your girlfriend, you don’t have the first idea of what’s going on. How could you?
And if we told you, you’d just think we were two more crazy girls.
“Jimmy, you have to call Dr. Alpert right away, and then I think they’re going to have to go to the hospital in Ridgemont. Isobel’s already done permanent damage to herself—God knows how much. All those piercings are almost certainly going to be infected. When did she start this?”
“Um, well…she first started acting weird after Caroline came to see her.”
“Caroline!” Bonnie blurted, confused. “Was she crawling?”
Jim gave her a look. “Huh?”
“Never mind Bonnie; she was joking,” Meredith said easily. “Jimmy, you don’t have to tell us about Caroline if you don’t want to. We—well, we know she was over at your house.”
“Does everybody know?” Jim asked miserably.
“No. Just Matt, and he only told us so that somebody could go check on your little sister.”
Jim looked guilty and stricken at once. The words poured out of him as if they’d been bottled up and now the cork was out of the bottle.
“I don’t know what’s going on anymore. All I can tell you is what happened. It was a couple days ago—late evening,” Jim said. “Caroline came over, and—I mean, I never even had a crush on her. It’s like, sure, she’s good-looking, and my parents were away and all, but I never thought I was the kind of guy…”
“Never mind that now. Just tell us about Caroline and Isobel.”
“Well, Caroline came over wearing this outfit that was—well, the top was practically transparent. And she just—she said, did I want to dance and it was, like, slow dancing and she—she, like, seduced me. That’s the truth. And the next morning she left—just about the time Matt came. That was the day before yesterday. And then I noticed Tami acting—crazy. Nothing I could do would stop her. And then I got a phone call from Isa-chan and—I’ve never heard her so hysterical. Caroline must have gone straight from my house to her house. Isa-chan said she was going to kill herself. And so I ran over here. I had to get away from Tami anyway because me being there at home just seemed to make it worse.”
Bonnie looked at Meredith and knew that they were both thinking the same thing: and somewhere in there, both Caroline and Tami propositioned Matt, too.
“Caroline must have told her everything.” Jim gulped. “Isa-chan and I haven’t—we were waiting, you know? But all Isa-chan would say to me was that I was going to be sorry. ‘You’ll be sorry; just wait and see,’ over and over and over. And, God, I am sorry.”
“Well, now you can stop being sorry and start calling the doctor. Right now, Jimmy.” Meredith gave him a swat on the behind. “And then you need to call your parents. Don’t give me those big brown puppy-dog eyes. You’re over eighteen; I don’t know what they can do to you for leaving Tami alone all this time.”
“But—”
“But me no buts. I mean it, Jimmy.”
Then she did what Bonnie knew she would, but was dreading. She approached Isobel again. Isobel’s head was down; she was pinching her navel with one hand. In the other, she held a long, shining nail.
Before Meredith could even speak, Isobel said, “So you’re in on it, too. I heard the way you called him ‘Jimmy.’ You’re all trying to take him away from me. All you bitches are trying to hurt me. Yurusenai! Zettai yurusenai!”
“Isobel! Don’t! Can’t you see that you’re hurting yourself?”
“I’m only hurting myself to take away the pain. You’re the one who’s really doing it, you know. You’re pricking me with needles inside.”
Bonnie jumped inside her own skin, but not just because Isobel suddenly gave a vicious thrust of the nail. She felt heat sweep up into her cheeks. Her heart began to pound even faster than it was already going.
Trying to keep one eye on Meredith, she pulled her mobile phone out of her back pocket where she’d stashed it after the visit to Caroline’s house.
Still with half her attention on Meredith, she went on the Internet and rapidly entered just two search words. Then, as she made a couple of selections from her hits, she realized that she could never absorb all the information in a week, much less a few minutes. But at least she had a start.
Just now, Meredith was backing away from Isobel. She put her mouth close to Bonnie’s ear and whispered, “I think we’re just antagonizing her. Did you get a good look at her aura?”
Bonnie nodded.
“Then we probably should leave the room, at least.”
Bonnie n
odded again.
“Were you trying to call Matt and Elena?” Meredith was eyeing the mobile phone.
Bonnie shook her head and turned the phone so Meredith could see her two search words. Meredith stared, then lifted dark eyes to Bonnie’s in a kind of horrified recognition.
Salem witches.
21
“It actually makes a horrible kind of sense,” Meredith said. They were in Isobel’s family room, waiting for Dr. Alpert. Meredith was at a beautiful desk made of some black wood ornamented with designs in gilt, working at a computer that had been left on. “The Salem girls accused people of hurting them—witches, of course. They said they were pinching them and ‘pricking them with pins.’”
“Like Isobel blaming us,” Bonnie said, nodding.
“And they had seizures and contorted their bodies into ‘impossible positions.’”
“Caroline looked as if she were having seizures in Stefan’s room,” said Bonnie. “And if crawling like a lizard isn’t contorting your body into an impossible position…here, I’ll try it.” She got down on the Saitous’ floor and tried to stick her elbows and knees out the way Caroline had. She couldn’t do it.
“See?”
“Oh, my God!” It was Jim at the doorway of the kitchen, holding—almost dropping—a tray of food. The smell of miso soup was sharp in the air, and Bonnie wasn’t sure if it made her feel hungry or if she was too sick to ever be hungry again.
“It’s okay,” she told him hastily, standing up. “I was just…trying something out.”
Meredith stood up too. “Is that for Isobel?”
“No, it’s for Obaasan—I mean Isa-chan’s grandma—Grandma Saitou—”
“I told you to call everybody whatever comes out naturally. Obaasan is fine, just like Isa-chan,” Meredith said softly and firmly to him.
Jim relaxed a hair. “I tried to get Isa-chan to eat, but she just throws the trays at the wall. She says that she can’t eat; that somebody’s choking her.”
Meredith glanced significantly at Bonnie. Then she turned back to Jim. “Why don’t you let me take it? You’ve been through a lot. Where is she?”
“Upstairs, second door on the left. If—if she says anything weird, just ignore it.”
“All right. Stay near Bonnie.”
“Oh, no,” Bonnie said hastily. “Bonnie is going with.” She didn’t know if it was for her own protection or Meredith’s, but she was going to stick like glue.
Upstairs, Meredith turned the hall light on carefully with her elbow. Then they found the second door on the left, which turned out to have a doll-like old lady in it. She was in the exact center of the room, lying on the exact center of a futon. She sat up and smiled when they came in. The smile turned a wrinkled face almost into the face of a happy child.
“Megumi-chan, Beniko-chan, you came to see me!” she exclaimed, bowing where she sat.
“Yes,” Meredith said carefully. She put the tray down beside the old lady. “We came to see you—Ms. Saitou.”
“Don’t play games with me! It’s Inari-chan! Or are you mad at me?”
“All these chans. I thought ‘Chan’ was a Chinese name. Isn’t Isobel Japanese?” whispered Bonnie from behind Meredith.
One thing, the doll-like old woman was not, was deaf. She burst into laughter, bringing up both hands to cover her mouth girlishly. “Oh, don’t tease me before I eat. Itadakimasu!” She picked up the bowl of miso soup and began to drink it.
“I think chan is something you put at the end of someone’s name when you’re friends, the way Jimmy was saying Isa-chan,” Meredith said aloud. “And Eeta-daki-mass-u is something you say when you start eating. And that’s all I know.”
Part of Bonnie’s mind noted that the “friends” Grandma Saitou had just happened to have names starting with M and B. Another part was calculating where this room was with relation to the rooms below it, Isobel’s room in particular.
It was directly above it.
The tiny old woman had stopped eating and was watching her intently. “No, no, you’re not Beniko-chan and Megumi-chan. I know it. But they do visit me sometimes, and so does my dear Nobuhiro. Other things do, too, unpleasant things, but I was raised a shrine maiden—I know how to take care of them.” A brief look of knowing satisfaction passed over the innocent old face. “This house is possessed, you know.” She added, “Kore ni wa kitsune ga karande isou da ne.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Saitou—what was that?” Meredith asked.
“I said, there’s a kitsune involved in this somehow.”
“A kit-su-nay?” Meredith repeated, quiz-zically.
“A fox, silly girl,” the old woman said cheerfully. “They can turn into anything they like, don’t you know? Even humans. Why, one could turn into you and your best friend wouldn’t know the difference.”
“So—a sort of were-fox, then?” Meredith asked, but Grandma Saitou was rocking back and forth now, her gaze on the wall behind Bonnie. “We used to play a circle game,” she said. “All of us in a circle and one in the middle, blindfolded. And we would sing a song. Ushiro no shounen daare? Who is standing behind you? I taught it to my children, but I made up a little song in English to go with it.”
And she sang, in the voice of the very old or the very young, with her eyes fixed innocently on Bonnie all the while.
“Fox and turtle
Had a race.
Who’s that far behind you?
Whoever came in
Second place
Who’s that near behind you?
Would make a nice meal
For the winner.
Who’s that close behind you?
Lovely turtle soup
For dinner!
Who’s that right behind you?”
Bonnie felt hot breath on her neck. Gasping, she whirled around—and screamed. And screamed.
Isobel was there, dripping blood onto the mats that covered the floor. She had somehow managed to get past Jim and to sneak into the dim upstairs room without anyone seeing or hearing her. Now she stood there like some distorted goddess of piercing, or the hideous embodiment of every piercer’s nightmare. She was wearing only a pair of very brief bikini bottoms. Otherwise she was naked except for the blood and the different kinds of hoops and studs and needles she had put through the holes. She had pierced every area Bonnie had ever heard that you could pierce, and a few that Bonnie hadn’t dreamed of. And every hole was crooked and bleeding.
Her breath was warm and fetid and nauseating—like rotten eggs.
Isobel flicked her pink tongue. It wasn’t pierced. It was worse. With some kind of instrument she had cut the long muscle in two so that it was forked like a snake’s.
The forked, pink thing licked Bonnie’s forehead.
Bonnie fainted.
Matt drove slowly down the almost invisible lane. There was no street sign to identify it, he noticed. They went up a little hill and then down sharply into a small clearing.
“‘Keep away from faerie circles,’” Elena said softly, as if she were quoting. “‘And old oaks…’”
“What are you talking about?”
“Stop the car.” When he did, Elena stood in the center of the clearing. “Don’t you think it has a faerie sort of feeling?”
“I don’t know. Where’d the red thing go?”
“In here somewhere. I saw it!”
“Me, too—and did you see how it was bigger than a fox?”
“Yes, but not as big as a wolf.”
Matt let out a sigh of relief. “Bonnie just won’t believe me. And you saw how quickly it moved—”
“Too quickly to be something natural.”
“You’re saying we didn’t really see anything?” Matt said almost fiercely.
“I’m saying we saw something supernatural. Like the bug that attacked you. Like the trees, for that matter. Something that doesn’t follow the laws of this world.”
But search as they would, they couldn’t find the animal. The bushes and shrub
s between the trees reached from the ground up in a dense circle. But there was no evidence of a hole or a hide or a break in the dense thicket.
And the sun was sliding down in the sky. The clearing was beautiful, but there was nothing of interest to them.
Matt had just turned to say so to Elena when he saw her stand up quickly, in alarm.
“What’s—?” He followed her gaze and stopped.
A yellow Ferrari blocked the way back to the road.
They hadn’t passed a yellow Ferrari on their way in. There was only room for one car on the one-lane road.
Yet there the Ferrari stood.
Branches broke behind Matt. He whirled.
“Damon!”
“Whom were you expecting?” The wraparound Ray-Bans concealed Damon’s eyes completely.
“We weren’t expecting anyone,” Matt said aggressively. “We just turned in here.” The last time he’d seen Damon, when Damon had been banished like a whipped dog from Stefan’s room, he’d wanted to punch Damon in the mouth very much, Elena knew. She could feel that he wanted it again now.
But Damon wasn’t the same as he’d been when he’d left that room. Elena could see danger rising off him like heat waves.
“Oh, I see. This is—your private area for—private explorations,” Damon translated, and there was a note of complicity in his voice that Elena disliked.
“No!” Matt snarled. Elena realized she was going to have to keep him under control. It was dangerous to antagonize Damon in this mood. “How can you even say that?” Matt went on. “Elena belongs to Stefan.”
“Well—we belong to each other,” Elena temporized.
“Of course you do,” said Damon. “One body, one heart, one soul.” For a moment there was something there—an expression inside the Ray-Bans, she thought, that was murderous.