Strangers She Knows

by Christina Dodd

  The light developed eyes, and swiveled toward the sink.

  Kellen looked at the chrome faucet where she’d poured herself water, at the mini-filtration system that protruded off the faucet’s arm. She staggered over there and peered into the chrome, and a Cheshire Kitten smiled with wicked delight. “She put drugs in the filter!” Kellen announced. She pulled herself fully erect, as if holding herself with a straight spine would counter the effects of the drug, and staggered across the kitchen toward the entry. “I’ve got to get to my hiding place and lock myself in,” she announced.

  But first—she was starving. Opening a package of crackers, she shoved a handful in her mouth. She followed that with another handful.

  She really wanted the tuna, but how could she open it? It was in a can. She didn’t remember how to open a can. “In the Army, I opened lots of cans,” she reminded herself, and stuck the tuna into her shirt.

  Again she started toward the stairs, then circled back to the canned tuna. She didn’t know how to open a can. “Look! It’s a pull top!” she announced, put it in her shirt, then returned to her quest for the stairs.

  Dimly she was aware she was behaving as Rae had behaved, moving in dizzy circles, unable to get where she wanted to go.

  But Kellen wasn’t a child. She could fight the drug and…wow. She found herself standing with her hand on the newel post. Look at the stairs. They never ended. If she climbed them, she could reach the stars. She put one foot up. And another foot up. She ran up three steps.

  Something dropped on her foot.

  She yelped in surprise, and watched the tuna can roll down the stairs. She laughed, because it was funny, and because she wore waterproof athletic shoes and the can didn’t hurt her toes. She ran a few more steps, and something else fell onto her foot. It was a tuna can. She waited for it to roll down the stairs, but it sat there like a guardian tuna, tail twitching in menace.

  She backed away, skidded a few steps down, clutched the handrail, and tried to remember where she was going.

  Upstairs to her room. She had to hurry, because… She didn’t know why.

  Yes, she did. Because Mara was coming.

  “I’m here.” Mara took her arm. “I see you got into the water.”

  Kellen stared at her, wide-eyed. “You did something to the filter.”

  “Full points to you.” Mara led Kellen up the stairs. “The thing about this drug is when I take it, it makes my brain normal.” She smiled, and her face turned into a cat’s.

  Kellen gasped.

  “But when you or any person with a normal brain takes it,” the Cheshire Cat said, “it changes your world in terrible ways. Or so they tell me. I do hope you can hear the air quotes when I say, ‘Normal.’”

  “I don’t like talking cats.”

  “I don’t like barking dogs, either.”

  They reached the top of the stairs, and they weren’t in the stars. They were in the corridor headed for Kellen and Max’s bedroom.

  “I need to go to the bedroom,” Kellen confided, “so I can lock the door.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because Mara is coming. Shhhh.”

  “I’m Mara.”

  Kellen looked. The cat rearranged its features and became Mara. “You’ll have to wait out here.” She frowned. “You’ve got a bump on your head. It’s a big bump.”

  Mara steered her through the bedroom door and over to the dressing table. “That’s what happens when a corpse falls on you.”

  “Nooo. That sounds awful.” Kellen sat, because Mara pushed her onto the dressing stool. “How did that happen?”

  “You bitch. You know. You did it.”

  “Did not.” But some vague memory pressed against Kellen’s skull, wanting out. “Jamie is flying with the birds,” she blurted.

  Mara trembled with some great emotion. Or maybe that was another illusion. Then she smiled, pressed Kellen’s left hand onto the polished wood of the dresser top and spread her fingers wide. “I was hoping it would come to this.” Her eyes gleamed with maniacal pleasure—and she drove a five-inch-long needle through Kellen’s left hand.

  42

  Kellen screamed: short, surprised, agonized. Tried to yank her hand away, and as muscles and tendons tore, she screamed again. She shook in the effort to stay very still, and stared at her hand, pinned to the dressing table, a silver needle protruding from the back. Blood oozed up, bright red and flowing easily as if pleased to be released. She gripped the needle with the fingers of her right hand and pulled.

  Torture. Torment.

  “How does it feel to be a failure?” Mara asked. “A nobody?”

  “Oh, God.” Kellen sobbed. “Why? Why would you do this?”

  “Your other hand is ruined.” Mara leaned against the dressing table and observed her. “Unworthy of my taking. I might as well mutilate this one, too, and teach you a lesson at the same time.”

  “What lesson does this teach?”

  “Don’t betray me, unfaithful friend.”

  Now Kellen understood how completely and cleverly Mara had trapped her. “You’re furious because I made it back to the house alive.”

  “You dumped a dead body on me.” Mara waved a hand toward the window, where demons shrieked and roared.

  For one moment, the window stretched sideways. A flash of light, and Kellen saw evil faces pressed against the wavering glass. They laughed, mouths wide open, spitting joy at the sight of human torment.

  Pain brought Kellen back to reality.

  No. Not demons. The storm. Lightning. Thunder. The old house was shaking under the assault.

  “I was trying to avoid your bullet. I didn’t know Jamie was there.” Kellen closed her eyes, picturing the scene. “There’s justice in what happened, and somewhere, Jamie’s laughing.”

  “No, she’s not. She’s dead!” Mara leaned in and squeezed the sides of Kellen’s hand.

  Agony streaked up Kellen’s nerves. She screamed—and struck out with her free hand.

  Mara leaped back.

  Kellen twisted sideways. The needle wiggled like the swivel point on a compass. Kellen screamed again.

  “Don’t be such a baby.” Mara moved close and thrust her own right palm in front of Kellen’s eyes. “See that?”

  Kellen blinked, trying to clear the moisture from her eyes.

  “See the scars?” Mara pointed at the center of her palm. “See this one?”

  Kellen nodded, in too much pain to speak—or to see.

  “That was the first one. I was five years old. I brought home a notice that I needed help with my reading. My father, I told you, taught English composition. In our house, only English composition mattered. Anything else was insignificant.” Mara was breathing quickly, staring and remembering. “I didn’t need help with my reading, he said. I needed to stop pretending to be stupid, he said.”

  Pain. Confusion. Kellen couldn’t comprehend. “Who?” She blinked again and focused on Mara’s palm, dotted with hard blue scars. What was she looking at?

  “My father.” Mara pointed at another hard blue scar on her palm. “That was the second one. I won a medal for a story I wrote. I was so proud. I thought he would be proud.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “The teacher sent a note with it saying I needed help with spelling and comprehension. She said I got my words mixed up. My father called me Moron. He used the word like it was my first name.”

  “Your father called you Moron.” Kellen didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand. “He… What did he do?”

  Patiently, Mara explained, “Every time I brought home a note saying I couldn’t read, every time a teacher called to tell my father I needed to be tutored, he took my mother’s beading needle and stabbed me through the palm.”

  “Like you did to me.” The pain in Kellen’s hand ma
de her queasy.

  This story made her sick.

  “He nailed me to the kitchen table. I didn’t need tutoring, he said. I was his daughter, he said. I should stop being stubborn and perform the work I pretended I couldn’t do.” Mara paced to the window and stared out at the night so black it pressed on the glass and howled with the were-wind. “In the morning, every time he released me, he made me kiss his hand and thank him.”

  Kellen fought through the drug-induced disorientation to certain deduction. “So it’s nature and nurture.”

  Mara turned in a slow swivel away from the window. “What are you babbling about?”

  “Rae and I were discussing nature versus nurture, and you—you’re the daughter of a madman. You’re the daughter of an abuser. You might have been less deadly if you’d had a loving childhood, but he abused you.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Had Kellen said it wrong? Was she back to the time after the surgery when her words were the wrong words? Had the drug destroyed all the work she’d done? She sobbed once, loudly, then control returned with a snap. “Your crazy father tormented you your whole crazy childhood and created a monster.”

  Mara put her palm on the window and with her nails, she scratched the glass. “He didn’t torment me. He wanted me to be better.”

  Kellen worked her way through the labyrinth of her own words. She’d said that Mara’s father was crazy and that Mara was crazy. Mara’s reply denied neither of those facts. She said… She said… “You’re defending him? His actions?”

  “He required the best from me.” Mara sounded proud.

  The world swelled and diminished, swelled and diminished, driven by the madness rife in this room. “Classic abused child defending the abusive parent. You are dyslexic. You couldn’t read. He refused any help for you. He preferred to hurt you instead.”

  Mara shouted, “I can read now. I demanded they teach me in prison. They brought in the best, and I learned. I learned!”

  “To make your father proud?”

  “No. I don’t care what he thought.” But Mara’s voice faltered.

  “When you were a child—didn’t anyone report him? Try to help you?”

  “One teacher.” Mara smiled faintly. “Father was a powerful man in the community. I defended my father. She left town in disgrace.”

  Kellen looked into Mara’s manic blue eyes. Damaged. Too damaged. The madness went clear to the bone. Nothing could have saved Mara. Nothing.

  “Once when I brought home an award for mathematics, I was so smug. At last he would see I wasn’t stupid. Instead he stabbed three needles into me. Mathematics was destroying the natural world, and I should be ashamed of myself for being competent in an inferior subject.”

  Kellen didn’t feel pity for the Mara that stood before her. But she pitied the child, sitting alone all night at a table, in the agony Kellen felt at this moment. “You poor little girl.”

  “I’m not a poor little girl.”

  Kellen looked around. Mara had disappeared. Was that a puff of smoke? “Come back,” she called. She didn’t want Mara with her, but more important, she didn’t want to be alone. And always, she harbored the impossible hope Mara would remove the needle.

  Suddenly, Mara was back.

  Suddenly, a glass of water balanced at the far edge of the dressing table.

  Water. Kellen was so thirsty. “Water,” she whispered.

  It was too far away. If Kellen reached for it, she’d hurt herself. And…and the drugs. Mara would give her more drugs. Kellen turned her face away—and shrieked in terror.

  Mara leaned close, so close her face was wild and distorted. Here was the demon Kellen feared. She stroked Kellen’s shoulders, dodged into one side of her face, then the other side.

  Kellen shrieked again.

  Mara whispered, “See how the needle gets broader and thicker where the eye awaits its thread? It’s such a tiny bit of width, yet try to raise your hand and slide it off, and free yourself. Come on. Do it!”

  That sounded reasonable; Kellen should be able to end the agony with a simple motion. She tried, and one inch of rise equaled a burst of agony. She dropped her head in defeat. Tears rose and leaked from her eyes.

  “See? It’s not so easy. For you…you’re weak.” Mara was triumphant. “For me… I endured it for seven years, from the time I entered school until I was twelve. At last, one night I wasn’t afraid anymore. I pulled my hand off the needle, and I ended my torment…forever.”

  “How?” Kellen knew. She knew. But she had to hear the details.

  “It was the dark before dawn. So apt! So perfect. I freed myself, pulled my hand off the table. The blood had pooled there. It was sticky, and the wood contained stains from all the other times. Father liked a record of what he’d done.”

  “A monster.” Kellen wasn’t sure if she was speaking of Mara or her father.

  “I pulled the tip of the bloody needle out of the table. I waited, huddled in Father’s easy chair by the fire. He rose, as he always did, at 5:00 a.m.—he believed a disciplined life created a man of character. I heard the water running for his shower—cold, of course. I imagined him dressing, and I heard him come down the stairs and walk toward the kitchen.” Mara told the story with animation, creating an atmosphere of dread. “He rounded the corner and looked surprised that I wasn’t in my place—and I launched myself at him, and stabbed the needle through his eye.”

  Kellen didn’t know what was worse, hearing about the abuse Mara’s father had doled out, or how Mara got her bloody revenge.

  “He screamed the way he always admonished me not to do. He tried to knock me aside, but I clung to him. He was my father!”

  “You loved him.”

  “Yes. I loved him.” Mara breathed hard. The Cheshire Cat was back, with its cruel smile. “He didn’t die all at once, so I knelt on his left arm and plunged the needle through his hand, eight times to commemorate each time he made me pay for my failure, and one time for his failure to anticipate my attack. You see, he had to pay for his failure, too.” Mara grabbed Kellen’s hair, jerked her head back, and stared into her eyes. “Everyone has to pay for their mistakes.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “That’s what he taught me. He was right. He paid. He died. I removed his hands, his soft, scholar’s hands, and kissed each one.”

  Kellen could see the ghosts of Mara’s prey, floating behind her. “Did you kiss their hands?”

  Mara looked wide-eyed at Kellen as if she’d pulled her back from a precipice of memory. “Who?”

  “When you took the hands of your other victims, did you kiss them, too?”

  “No. They weren’t worthy.”

  The ghosts shrank back and blew away with the wind.

  “How did they catch you?” Kellen asked. “The authorities?”

  “My mother…she wouldn’t stop screaming, and she had never loved me like my father did. She’d tell him not to hurt me. She never wanted me to be better.” Now Mara’s voice was indifferent. “So I killed her, too.”

  Kellen couldn’t remove her gaze from her hand, pinned to the table, writhing, then still, seeking a way to escape the pain. Yet although agony buzzed along her nerves and the world stretched and rolled, she heard every word of Mara’s story. The horror sank into her bones, and she feared the craziness and the cruelty would infect her, too. She feared the drugs would take her to the edge of psychosis and beyond. “You murdered both your parents, and you went to juvenile prison.”

  “Of course. The authorities released me when I was eighteen. They said I was fixed.” Mara chuckled. “All I had to do was stay on my medication. I didn’t. I found a man to pay for my ticket to the US, and I came here with him. He died.”

  “All your men must die.”

  Mara shrugged. “Eventually. Eventually, they all try
to betray me.”

  Kellen was thirsty. So thirsty. She reached for the water, but her fingertips couldn’t quite reach.

  Mara chuckled. “Frustrating, isn’t it? I’ll free you in the morning. Let you have food and water. Let you run—and shoot the legs out from under you. It’s not going to be another day like today. You won’t survive.”

  “I don’t care if I survive. I only care if Rae survives.”

  “She will. She will.” In one of those sudden moves that made Mara so spooky, she knelt beside Kellen and took her free hand, her atrophied hand, and held it. “You don’t understand. I’ve decided I’m going to make it my life’s mission to care for Rae.”

  What did she mean? “Max will care for Rae.”

  “No. He’s going to die, too. He was supposed to die first, to make you suffer more, but he got off the island. Broke my heart, that did.”

  Kellen’s heart, too, for she feared for him…and she needed him.

  “But Rae—she’ll need someone to take care of her, to show her how to control people, make them love her, want to do things for her. How to build a network of sycophants—”

  “You want to make Rae into a copy of yourself!” The drug Mara had given Kellen swam in her blood, muddling her thinking and making her afraid of…everything. She’d been afraid Mara would kill Rae. But this was worse, and the horror of imagining Rae, helpless at the hands of this fiend, vanquished every other terror.

  Before Kellen could move, Mara patted her shoulder, and with casual cruelty, tweaked the needle in her hand.

  Through the explosion of pain, Kellen heard her say, “I realized—it’s not you who is my soul mate. It’s your daughter. I promise I won’t ever let her be alone.”

  43

  Mara went to the door and turned off the lights. “Sweet dreams, former best friend of mine. Don’t hurt yourself trying to reach that water.”

  Kellen sank back in the chair and cried. Cried tears of agony, tears of love, tears of failure, tears of hunger and thirst. The moon streamed in the window, white light that made stark and clear her dilemma. Suddenly, the light was extinguished. She looked out.