The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Nick Clausen

  Rebecca shakes her head. “I’m not going to do it. I won’t dye my hair. You can’t make me!”

  But of course, the creature can.

  It reaches out and grabs Rebecca by the arm, pulling her out of bed. Rebecca screams and fights to get free. It drags her out into the bathroom, puts the bag in the sink, then leaves and locks the door.

  Rebecca is left alone, kicking the door. She rubs her arm and forces back angry tears.

  “Fuck you!” she shouts. “I’m not doing it!”

  She waits for an answer, but can only hear the sound of the stairs, as the creature walks calmly downstairs.

  Rebecca sits down on the toilet and breathes deeply. She can’t do it. She can’t change her appearance like that—wearing the strange clothes is one thing, but dying her hair—she’d rather starve to death.

  And that seems to be exactly what will happen.

  The creature comes back a few times to check on her; just a brief look, before it closes the door and locks it again.

  Rebecca drinks water from the sink and tries to make time go by without thinking about her hair or the hunger, which becomes more and more intense.

  She stays in the bathroom all night, sleeping in the tub.

  The following day, the creature again checks in on her a few times.

  When noon comes around, Rebecca is so hungry, she can’t take it anymore.

  “It’s just hair,” she tells herself in the mirror. The Rebecca staring back at her looks thin and pale and has dark circles around her eyes. “It’s just hair, it doesn’t mean anything. Besides, I always wanted to be a blonde.”

  She tries to smile, but it turns into tears, as she opens the bag with trembling fingers.

  She follows the instructions of the packet, finishing off by washing her hair in the tub.

  Just as she reaches for the towel, she sees the door in the mirror. It’s open. The creature is standing there, smoking its cigar, looking in at her.

  “What are you looking at?” Rebecca snarls. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  The creature takes a long drag on the cigar and blows out the smoke. “Good, Alice,” it whispers. Then, it simply turns and walks away, leaving the door halfway open.

  “I’m not Alice!” Rebecca shouts. “My name is Rebecca!”

  She takes one last look in the mirror. She did a pretty awful job; the roots are still dark, and some places are whiter than others. But she doesn’t really care anymore. She just wants something to eat.

  When she comes downstairs, the creature has prepared an extra-large ham sandwich for her.

  For once, Rebecca is allowed to eat alone.

  DAY 21

  The following evening, after dinner, as Rebecca has gone up to her room with Boris, the creature comes and opens the door without knocking.

  “Downstairs, Alice,” it tells her from the doorway, then turns and leaves without waiting for a reply.

  Rebecca’s pulse immediately rises. This is something new, and she has a bad feeling about it.

  She considers staying here, or even trying to hide. But she knows that won’t work. Also, she can feel the creature’s patience becoming thinner and thinner the more she resists; anymore disobedience, and she’ll likely get punished severely. Her feet are aching from the last burn. So, she decides the wiser course is to simply follow the creature downstairs and find out what it wants.

  She picks up Boris and brings him for moral support.

  All the way down to the living room, her fear and dread for what’s to come rises steadily, until her knees feel shaky.

  She clutches Boris to her chest and peers into the dimly lit living room. She spots the creature by the piano, the cigar it in its mouth and its back to her.

  Slowly, it turns its head and lifts one boney hand to wave her closer.

  Rebecca approaches the piano but stops a few paces away.

  “What … what do you want?” she asks, her voice thin.

  The creature doesn’t answer her. It takes out the cigar and places it in an overfilled ashtray on top of the piano. Then it begins playing, and Rebecca immediately recognizes the melody she has heard many times. What she at first took for the radio must have been the creature playing.

  She watches in silent wonder, almost forgetting her fears, at the gangly figure producing those soft, melancholy tunes. And she realizes she knows the song. It’s the lullaby Mom used to sing when Rebecca was little. She hasn’t heard it for years, but she can still remember the lyrics, and her eyes fill with tears, as she whispers along to the melody.

  Once the verse is over, the creature plays the melody over again. Then, the third time around, it says: “Sing, Alice.”

  And Rebecca finally realizes why the creature brought her hear. It doesn’t want simply to play to her; it’s wants to play with her, to hear her sing.

  “No,” Rebecca croaks, almost sobbing now.

  “Sing, Alice,” the creature repeats, staring over once more.

  Rebecca doesn’t want to sing, but she knows what will likely happen if the creature needs to tell her a third time, so she begins singing softly along with the melody:

  “Hush-a-bye baby

  On the treetop,

  When the wind blows

  The cradle will rock.

  When the bough breaks,

  The cradle will fall,

  And down will fall baby

  Cradle and all.”

  The creature starts over, and Rebecca sings the verse again; it’s the only one she knows. The creature doesn’t seem to mind, and it plays the melody over five or six more times, accompanied by Rebecca’s low singing.

  Finally, it stops, takes the cigar and heaves a deep drag, blowing out the air slowly and watching it drift to the ceiling.

  “Can … can I go now?” Rebecca whispers, her cheeks wet from tears, Boris sleeping in her arms.

  The creature doesn’t answer, but it turns its head slowly and gives a tiny nod. Rebecca hurries back upstairs.

  As she lies in bed a few minutes later, trying to sleep, she feels a weird mixture of feelings. She misses her family more than ever, but she’s also afraid. In a strange way, singing with the creature was worse than getting her feet burned. Rebecca can’t figure out why, but she feels terrible inside.

  “I hope that was the only time it wants me to sing,” she whispers to Boris, who’s snoring at the foot of her bed.

  But it wasn’t.

  Every evening from then on, the creature comes to get her after dinner, uttering those same two words from the doorway: “Downstairs, Alice.”

  And every evening, Rebecca goes downstairs to sing the lullaby while the creature plays the piano, feeling awful afterwards.

  DAY 23

  The creature also demands other, smaller things from Rebecca. Some of them rather peculiar.

  Like, one morning, at breakfast, it suddenly tells her: “Other hand, Alice.”

  Rebecca, who’s shoveling down eggs, looks across the table at the open newspaper, which the creature is holding.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Other hand,” the creature repeats.

  She just stares at the newspaper for a few seconds, before it begins to dawn on her what it means.

  She puts the fork in her left hand. “Like this? But I’m not left-handed.”

  She continues eating with her right.

  “Other hand, Alice,” the creature says, its voice rising. And this time, it lowers the newspaper enough for its tiny black eyes to stare at her.

  Rebecca immediately looks down on her plate and shifts the fork. Eating with her left hand seems like a very little sacrifice, so she doesn’t make a fuss about it.

  In the days to come, she forgets about it almost every meal, but the creature reminds her patiently from across the table: “Other hand, Alice,” and Rebecca slowly gets used to eating left-handed.

  Rebecca knows the reason for these things, of course. She knows the creature wants her to be Alice, to be like the dead
girl it once knew.

  She tells herself it’s no big deal, that she can do it in order to survive, that it’s simply a matter of keeping her head down until she can get away from here.

  But from a deeper part of her, a sense of growing dread gets a little bit bigger each time she voluntarily adjusts her own behavior. It goes against who Rebecca is in her heart, and it scares her.

  The weirdest thing is, other than those areas, the creature seems oddly non-interested in how Rebecca spends her time—as long, of course, she doesn’t act disrespectful or try to escape.

  And so long as Rebecca does what it wants, they fall into an almost peaceful coexistence.

  Besides for the burnings and the blindings every third night.

  DAY 28

  More days go by; still no one comes for her.

  Rebecca begins to venture out of her room more and more. She prefers to do so whenever she can sense the creature is outside, working in the garden or fixing something in the garage. Whenever it drives off in the van, it always locks the doors beforehand, trapping Rebecca in the house.

  Her fear diminishes as she realizes the creature isn’t going to kill her or do anything worse than burn her feet and blind her eyes—which is bad enough, of course, but she also somehow gets used to the pain; or at least, she learns to get through it.

  It provides her with a sense of comfort knowing what to expect from the creature. She can predict approximately when it’ll leave and when it’ll be back again, when it’s safe for her to walk around the house, when the meals will be served, when it goes to bed, and so on.

  Whenever it’s at home, Rebecca stays mostly in her room; not so much because she’s afraid it’ll harm her if it sees her, she just doesn’t like being around it when she doesn’t have to. She can never really tell where in the house it is, as it moves very quietly.

  Boris sleeps in Rebecca’s room every night, curled up by her feet. Whenever she wakes up from a nightmare, she’s thankful the dog is there.

  Every evening, after they have played and sang together, and Rebecca has gone to bed, the creature comes up to her room to say good night.

  The scene is always the same: Rebecca lies in bed. She hears the stairs creak. The door opens. From the doorway, the creature whispers: “Sleep tight, Alice,” right before closing the door.

  Rebecca never answers; she’s grown wary of correcting the name, which the creature seems determined to call her. Until one night, when Rebecca is in a bad mood.

  “I’m not Alice,” she says loudly. “Alice is dead.”

  The creature freezes in the doorway. Though the lighting is dim and Rebecca’s eyesight is blurry, she can tell the tall figure is shaking its head.

  “No,” it whispers. “No, no, no!” The voice turns into a thunderous roar, causing Rebecca to sit up and Boris to begin whining.

  For one fearful moment, she’s sure the creature will come at her. It actually looks like it struggles to keep itself back, trembling in the doorway, clutching the frame with both hands.

  Then, it simply shakes its head once more, and repeats calmly, “No,” then closes the door.

  For the first time, that night, the creature doesn’t go to bed at the usual time. Instead, it stays up, playing the piano over and over again for almost two hours, that same lullaby.

  And as Rebecca lies in bed, listening, she can’t help but whisper along, while thinking about her mom and her dad and Andy and Cindy, and she cries deeper than ever before.

  And while she does so, it’s as though something shifts inside of her—or rather, falls into place. It’s a realization which makes her scared, but even more sad.

  Rebecca realizes that no one will come for her right now. That it could be many days, perhaps even months, before she gets found.

  Which means, that for now, this house is her new home.

  DAY 76

  Rebecca is sitting on the chair in the room with the brown wallpaper and staring out of the window at nothing in particular, hardly noticing the open fields or the orange evening sky above.

  She has no idea how long she’s been here; she long since gave up counting the days. But when she came here, the fields had tiny, green sprouts, and now the wheat is knee-high. The weather is warmer, too, and the days longer.

  She’s spent many hours right here, on the chair in front of the window. Down in the living room she can hear the grandfather clock. Rebecca counts twelve chimes. She hates that clock. No matter where she is in the house, she can hear it. Every hour it reminds her that time is moving. And it reminds her of the church bells she could hear from her room. The sound makes her homesick.

  “Duuip!”

  A cry from a bird in the distance. The sound makes Rebecca straighten a little.

  It’s them. They’re back.

  She leans forward and listens. Another cry, closer this time. She can’t see the birds yet. She opens the window and listens. Another couple of cries, before the birds finally come into view.

  “Duuip! Duuip!”

  Although Rebecca doesn’t have her bird book or access to the Internet, she still remembers the names of most of the local species, and these are without a doubt lapwings.

  The birds circle above the house, disappear out of sight for a moment, then reappear and land on the lawn. They mince around on their skinny legs, looking for food in the grass. From this far away, Rebecca can’t make out any details, but she still smiles to herself. She leans her cheek against the cold window glass and watches the birds.

  Then, suddenly, they take flight, soaring close by the window, and Rebecca listens as their cries disappear into the distance. She wishes she was a lapwing herself and could go with them.

  The stairs creak. The familiar sound of footsteps.

  Rebecca gets up and waddles to the bed where she sits back down. The door opens. The creature looks in at her.

  Rebecca doesn’t like looking, but she doesn’t like not looking, either, so she fastens her gaze on the greyish hand resting on the doorknob. She can’t make out the long, skinny fingers very well, but she knows the touch of them intimately; they’re rough and chapped and very cold. The smell from the creature fills the room.

  “It’s time, Alice,” it whispers. “Lie down.”

  “My name is not Alice,” Rebecca says, still staring at the hand. “It’s Rebecca.”

  She has said it hundreds of times, perhaps even thousands. The creature doesn’t care; it just keeps calling her Alice, as though it doesn’t even hear her.

  The hand lets go of the knob and goes to the collarbone, where it scratches the skin through the shirt. Rebecca stares at the hand because she doesn’t want to look at the face, which always gives her the shivers. It’s too narrow and the forehead is too high, topped off with white tusks of dying hair. The nose is a thin, sharp edge, running from the grey upper lip to the brow protruding like a cliff, hiding the eyes in a permanent shadow.

  And they are the worst.

  The eyes.

  Small, black, circular and gleamy. No life behind them. Glass-like.

  She only looks the creature in the eye when she absolutely can’t help it.

  The hand stops scratching and goes to the front pocket. The long fingers pull out a cigar and places it between the cracked lips. Rebecca watches as the creature finds the lighter and lights up the cigar. The smoke fills the room almost instantly.

  The creature repeats the command: “Lie down, Alice.”

  Rebecca hesitates for another few seconds, then lies down on her back, her legs slightly apart and her arms at her sides. The creature comes over and sits down at the foot of the bed, making the springs creak.

  Rebecca clutches the bed linen with both hands, breathes through her nose and looks up into the ceiling. She tries to imagine she can hear the lapwings somewhere in the distance. That she has X-ray vision and is able to see them fly around above the roof.

  The creature sits for half a minute, pulsing on the cigar. The wait is always the worst.

&nb
sp; Then she feels its rough hand grab her ankle and lift up her bare foot. Rebecca squeezes her lips together tightly, but she doesn’t close her eyes—for some reason, the pain is worse with eyes closed.

  The low seething sound comes first, boding the pain which follows half a second later. Rebecca gives off a whimper, as burning needles force their way up through the sole of her foot and spreads out into the toes. There’s a long second of rising pain, reaching almost an unbearable level, then it subsides. The creature lies her leg back down on the bed and takes the other one.

  “Now the other, Alice.”

  The same exact words, the same exact tone.

  The creature takes a long drag off of the cigar, firing it up again, before repeating the procedure with the other foot. The needles sink in, the pain increases until the point where she almost screams out—and then it goes away again, turning into a dull throbbing.

  Rebecca goes limp all over, feeling the sweat on her forehead and her heart pounding dully in her chest.

  The creature lets go of her ankle and goes on to the eyes. They are a lot easier to deal with than the feet; the pain is nowhere near as bad.

  Rebecca holds her breath so as to not breathe in the stench from the creature as it leans over her. She turns her eyes sideways, staring into the wall and not at the figure looming over her. The creature breathes calmly as it administers the cool drops to Rebecca’s eyes. She blinks as the liquid runs down her cheeks like sluggish tears. A slight sting, and she blinks it off.

  The creature gets to its feet. “It’s done. You did well, Alice.”

  It doesn’t wait for an answer, it just heads for the door.

  “My name is not Alice,” Rebecca automatically replies, wiping the excess liquid from her cheeks. “It’s …”

  She pauses, and for a terrible moment, the name is gone. Her mouth is open, but no sound comes out.

  “It’s …” she says again, trying to force it to appear. “It’s …” And then it comes. “Rebecca!” she blurts out, feeling a deep sense of relief. “Rebecca Wisler! My name is Rebecca Wisler.”