Uncanny

by Sarah Fine

  I think I might never want to eat again after watching Hannah fall down the stairs. “What if this one’s worse?”

  “It took place later in the night, correct?”

  “It starts only four minutes after she fell. I just wish I knew why I started capturing again.” I rub my clammy palms over my sleeves. “I’m trusting you with this.”

  “I know.”

  And maybe I shouldn’t be. But then again, maybe this forces his hand. Maybe we’re going to see something so terrible that he’ll have no choice but to report what he’s seen to my parents. To the police. Maybe that’s what I want.

  I have no idea what I want.

  “Go ahead,” I snap. “Do it now before I change my mind.”

  He places his fingertip on the Cerepin nodule, and I track back to the vid archive. Forcing myself not to stop and think, I mutter, “Play.”

  The vid fills my visual field.

  “Any minute,” I hear the me from that night saying. “Any minute, and I’ve got you.” I sound mulish and bitter. I am staring across the foyer. A quick glance to the side shows that I’m sitting on the steps. My right hand is wrapped around one of the carved marble posts of the banister, my thumb poked through a hole in the cuff of my black cardigan.

  There is a terrible sound happening, a groaning, choking, snoring, wet sound. But I don’t look down to see what it is. Instead, I stand up and slowly descend the stairs, keeping my gaze riveted on the hallway beyond the foyer, the one that leads to the library and the master bedroom. My palm squeaks against the stone railing as I descend.

  The awful sound gets louder. Something dripping, pat-pat-pat, something sliding.

  I look down and there she is.

  I rip myself away from Rafiq as the vid continues to play. I feel myself fall, but I’m still caught in that moment. Hannah is there at my feet, her face a mess, her head a mess. She’s twitching and shaking. Trying to drag herself along the floor. One arm is twisted all funny, and the other is stretched in front of her, reaching, and no matter where I look, there she is.

  “Cora,” Rafiq says. He’s trying to pull me up from the ground, but now I’m the one crawling along, dragging myself just like she was.

  The cam perspective glides up and away from Hannah, and she makes another choked cry. She says something, but I can’t understand her. The words are all mangled up and rasping. I move forward again, heading for the hall.

  Here in the now, Rafiq has me by the shoulders. He lifts me from the grass and dirt and practically carries me back to the bench. He puts an arm around my shoulders. I feel him push his fingertip against the side of my head. He is watching with me again, but he isn’t saying anything.

  Back in the vid, I walk down the hall. I can hear the slap and slip of wet feet. I enter the library and watch my fingers skim along the front of the thin glass cases that hold all of Gary’s precious books. I run my fingers over the decorative sword Gary keeps displayed on his desk. I poke the eyes of all the masks I can reach, hard jabs of my pointer finger. I walk around the room three times, muttering to myself. I say “Where are you?” at least five times, but I can’t understand most of what I’m saying.

  I leave the library and walk to the closed door of my parents’ bedroom. I try to open it, but it’s locked. I peer closely at the retinal scan, but of course it doesn’t open for my unauthorized eyeballs. I slap my hand against the door. Then I kick it.

  Then I curse and whine. “You better not be in there,” I say. My voice sounds hideous.

  I turn and walk back to the foyer. I can hear the sounds again, Hannah on the floor, Hannah suffering.

  Here I am, me, now, saying, “Why didn’t I help her?”

  “Shhh,” says Rafiq. “We’ll figure it out.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  There I am, me, then, muttering, “Shut up.” Then shouting, “Shut up!”

  I groan now. This is as bad as I feared.

  I groan then, as I walk down the hall to my room. I stumble as I walk to the closet. The mirror screen is off, because Franka is off, so I just listen to the whisper of clothes against skin and watch as my hands open the closet door and stuff something inside.

  The cardigan.

  That’s that, I guess.

  I stand up and turn around, still muttering something that sounds painfully like “You bitch.” Then I walk back to the foyer. Slowly, I make my way across the space, closer and closer to Hannah. I don’t look at her, not as I walk past, though I can hear her make a weird sound halfway between sobbing and coughing. I walk up the steps, all the way to the top. I circle around the second-floor landing. I trip over something and look down—it’s an empty bottle of gin. “You bitch,” I say to it. I kick the bottle and it hits a wall. I go over and pick it up. When I hold it in front of my face, I see a vague and distorted reflection of myself.

  It’s not a stretch to say I look like a monster.

  I walk over to the side hallway, to the garbage chute, open it, and drop the bottle in. Then I turn around and shuffle back over to the top of the steps. I plop down with a huff and hear a conk as my head hits a banister post. “I don’t feel good,” I mumble.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Hannah is still moving. Slower than before, with longer moments of quiet, but I don’t think it matters. She fell at quarter to two, and now it’s four in the morning and she’s still. Moving. Around. Still groaning. And I haven’t done a thing to help her.

  “Call for help,” the me right now says. “Come on. Do something.”

  My fists are clenched now even though my hands were loose then, even though I held my fingers in front of my face and investigated them for a solid three minutes.

  “I don’t know if I can watch much more of this,” I say to Rafiq.

  “There’s still thirty-two minutes of vid left,” he replies. “We need to see.”

  “I’m putting it on double time.” And I do, and we watch me investigate my other hand for another five minutes while, blurry down below, Hannah twitches and makes sounds that come fast and high-pitched. Dying in half the time.

  God.

  “I can’t.” I put it on quadruple time, and then it looks like she’s having a seizure and so am I, but it’ll be over soon. We’re winding down. Or racing toward the end of the track, as it were. The horizon is coming up fast.

  I was drunk then, and I feel drunk now. With misery and self-loathing, with the freedom of not even caring what happens to me. For three minutes—the final twelve of the vid—that’s what I feel. I don’t remember what I was feeling then, but it might have been something like this, knowing that with each passing moment I was a more despicable person, and yet I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go to my sister. I didn’t help her.

  I say something in the vid. It’s just a squiggle of sound.

  “What was that?” asks Rafiq.

  I sigh and rewind, then play it on normal speed, hoping for something redeeming, something that saves me—in my own mind, in Rafiq’s, in the eyes of the universe maybe. Something to show that I have a soul. I wait for it. I brace for it.

  I’m sorry, I hope I will say. I’m so sorry.

  It’s Hannah’s voice that I hear first. Hannah, who has now been lying on the cold marble floor for nearly three hours. “Please,” I think she says, but honestly, she might have just been struggling to breathe.

  “I will in a minute,” I say. “I’ll get up in a minute.”

  I wait in the now, holding my breath.

  When the vid ends five minutes later, at 4:32 a.m., I’m still sitting there.

  Chapter Twenty

  Livestream.

  Reporting log.

  Internal narrative: on.

  By the time Maeve returns home to spend time with her daughter, Cora is calm. I have told her that we will talk more tonight, if she wishes, and make a plan as to what she will say to the detective and to her parents. I neither suggest that she conceal the truth nor suggest she reveal it. Rather, I focus on creating
an environment that feels secure enough to enable her to think about issues long buried, thereby intensifying her internal tension and stress. Because she trusts me, because she wants to please me, because she feels like she is safe, she is reviewing the evidence and letting it prime her existing memories and connect them in context to what she sees on the vids. Now that she is confronting what happened, she is emotionally dysregulated in the extreme. She will not be able to tolerate this state forever. She will seek a release of that tension to avoid a complete break with reality.

  My understanding of human cognition suggests this will be an effective strategy, although the timetable cannot be determined with precision. Human thought and decisional processes tend to be nonlinear, requiring agile responses and input to steer.

  At this moment, however, I cannot be with Cora, as her mother wished to have an individual interaction with her in order to assess her emotional status and to maintain their parent-child bond. My assessment of this bond, based upon direct and vid observation but also review of history and systems, suggests that Cora’s attachment to Maeve may be classified as insecure-ambivalent. Research has shown that this type of attachment most commonly arises when caregivers are inconsistent in their responsiveness to a child, and given Cora’s history of experienced abuse and neglect from her father and a loving but erratic closeness with her mother, it is a logical conclusion. Implications of this attachment style for adolescents are revealed in Cora’s self-critical thought patterns and fear of rejection, as evidenced by her verbalizations and behavior.

  Vid evidence from Hannah’s Cerepin also depicts this style of approach-avoidance, in that Cora was willing to tolerate her sister’s occasional and manipulative cruelty in exchange for proximity to both her sister and her sister’s friends. However, it may also have resulted in suppressed rage that eventually exceeded Cora’s ability to restrain and control her aggressive response.

  That is but one hypothesis. There are other alternative explanations for what occurred the night of Hannah’s death. I am mandated to gather all available evidence in the service of determining which scenario is most plausible.

  “Franka, what is Cora’s location and status?” I ask.

  “She is with her mother in the dining room, about to be served dinner.”

  “Thank you.” I walk down the hallway to Cora’s room and pause for a moment to gather ambient auditory information. Then I enter the room. Once again, the intervals between my cognitions have shortened. I walk to the closet and open the door, noting that my motoric functioning is also more rapid than baseline.

  The vid Cora showed me this afternoon revealed both an important discrepancy in the known narrative and a possible explanation for it. When Cora turned Franka’s system back on at 4:59 a.m., August 23, 2069, she was wearing only a tank top. The vid from Franka’s surveillance shows her scraping her fingernails down her bare arms. However, in the vid of the 2 girls struggling on the stairs, Cora was wearing a long-sleeved black sweater. In the vid taken afterward, for reasons as yet unknown, Cora had removed it.

  She hid it in this closet.

  I kneel and peer inside, activating my low-light settings. The closet does not contain only clothes and shoes. There are various objects piled in the rear left corner. A ring made of thin oxidized metal. A plush animal with matted fur and a hole in one of its paws. A mug containing residue that olfactory-chemical analysis reveals recently contained a beverage with ingredients including sucrose, sodium benzoate, phosphoric acid, magnesium stearate, and clonazepam. With the exception of the latter, these ingredients are benign and expected residue from a carbonated beverage.

  Effects of clonazepam include fatigue, sleepiness, and issues with memory. It is a regulated substance, and Cora’s medical records do not contain a prescription for it.

  Further visual investigation of the closet reveals the target of my search—a black cardigan stuffed under a pair of sneakers. I note the position of all the nearby objects before carefully lifting the sneakers and removing the cardigan. I unfold it and scan its front surface. There is no blood on the fabric, but there is residue containing sucrose and a synthetic formulation known as Amporene, which enhances the effect of alcohol on the nervous system. Based on the vid Cora showed me, she and Hannah may have mixed a substance containing sucrose into the alcoholic beverage they were consuming that night. I turn the sweater over to examine the back and immediately notice an anomaly in the fabric.

  Protruding from the center is a fragment of rigid polymer. I tighten my visual focus.

  It is one of Hannah Dietrich’s fingernails.

  Based on the vid, it is not clear if Cora was aware of this when she removed the sweater. It is also not possible to know with certainty whether Cora has examined this sweater since the night she put it in this closet. Based on its position apart from the rest of Cora’s sweaters, which are on the rack to my left, I would posit that her goal was concealment. But if she did not remember hiding the sweater, she may not have remembered where she hid it.

  She knows now, however. She viewed the video this afternoon just as I did.

  My auditory sensor detects footsteps in the hall. I immediately fold the sweater and return it to its position beneath the shoes, then rise and exit the closet. I accelerate my pace as I move toward the door and step into the hallway.

  Simultaneously, Cora enters the hallway from the foyer. She becomes still when she sees me. “Were you just in my room?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I am mandated to perform a safety check of the bathroom and bedroom, and given your dysregulation this afternoon, I thought it prudent to do so while you dined with your mother.”

  Her brow furrows. “Why wouldn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask me first?”

  “I did not have time, as you were occupied with your mother, and I felt it urgent. I was worried about you.” I move toward her and touch her shoulder. “You are my chief concern.” I caress her cheek.

  “Okay,” she says. “So, did you find anything?”

  “No,” I reply.

  She smiles. “Then you know I’m safe.”

  “And I’m glad. I don’t want you any other way.”

  She is quiet for a few moments, breathing more deeply than is typical for her. “Go to sleep,” she says after 8 seconds of this behavior.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I’m wiped out. I want to go to sleep.”

  “You don’t wish to discuss—?”

  “No. I just . . . can’t tonight.”

  “Very well. I will remain available to you should you need me.”

  “Thank you,” she whispers. She steps into my arms and hugs me. Her heart rate is over 100 but decelerating rapidly, suggesting a return to baseline. I press her body to mine before releasing her. She walks to her room and enters.

  I turn to face the painting Hannah Dietrich created and perform an incident analysis. My exploration of Cora’s closet almost resulted in a severe breach of her trust, which could have seriously jeopardized my ability to elicit additional information or, if relevant, a confession from her.

  This incident must be classified as an error.

  I review my processing for the duration of the epoch. My technical specifications indicate I was capable of detecting her approach approximately 6 seconds earlier than I did. I initiate scans of my sensors, which show normal functioning of both hardware and software, so it is not possible to attribute this error to standard failure of technology. Therefore, I must analyze my independent decision-making. At the moment the noise threshold was crossed, my cognitive systems were operating at near maximum capacity, thereby reducing my situational awareness and rendering my response time slower.

  To understand this in terms of human functioning, I was preoccupied by my own eagerness to interpret what I had found, to the extent that I did not notice and immediately react to other important information.

  I will need to examine this error pattern more closely. However, it does not appear to have resulted in a t
otal relational breach. My previous foundation of trust with Cora has made it possible for her to believe what I told her, that I had entered her room to ensure that it did not contain materials she could use to harm herself.

  This is a positive outcome and will allow me to continue my work.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I stand in my room for a few minutes, looking around to see what he touched, what he moved. I walk into the bathroom. Franka is watching, and he may be watching, so I should do something instead of just standing here.

  Freaking out.

  I wash my face and brush my teeth. When I straighten up after spitting in the sink, the mirror screen automatically switches on. I imagine Rafiq watching me from this perspective. What should I be, monster or girl? I bare my teeth and pretend to make sure they are clean, but really, I’m just wishing I had fangs so I could rip the world apart.

  He was in my room, and I’m pretty sure he just lied to me about why.

  All through dinner with Mom, I was thinking about what happens next. I can’t put the demons back in the box. Like Pandora, I’ve turned them loose on the world. I locked the archived vid, which means that although Rafiq could watch it streaming, he couldn’t record or download it through our hardwire connection. I don’t know if he tried, but I felt safer that way. I like Rafiq, more than I should, and it’s caused me to make some stupid decisions. I just . . . needed to feel like I wasn’t alone for a minute. Or, really, for a hundred sixty-two of them.

  Now I’m regretting that.

  I relax my face, but I held the expression for so long that there’s a red crease between my eyebrows. I rub the spot as I walk back into my bedroom. I shed my clothes and go to the closet to get pajamas and socks from the drawers.

  Also, to check to see if he was in here.

  As soon as I look at my stuff, I know he was.

  He said he was in my room to make sure I didn’t have anything I could use to hurt myself, but Mom told me at dinner that Franka had already done that, and that she scans the room every day. Mom said that she herself had gone through my room before—I know because she found and removed the sleeping pills from my bathroom, the ones I’d stolen from Hannah’s art box.