I stood in the middle of the room with my hands gripping my head. I was crying without meaning to, my face utterly still. I had a flush of dizziness, I was sick with it. For once I did not know even one tiny measly piece of what I was supposed to do. My legs pained from trembling. I sat down and heard a plastic crinkle underneath the bedding. My head began to roll. I touched my forehead and the burn had deepened. My fingers came away sweaty despite my shivers, and the ceiling spun down and was directly in front of me, and with every blink I saw black-glass eyes and chalky hands.
I lay in a dreamy, seasick roll of unreality. Was this how Fritzi felt when she and Theodore doped up? Dorian’s face came and went over the hours, or minutes. He put his hand against my forehead. He checked my temperature with the same glass stick Mama used. When I fully woke, there was a taste in my mouth, metallic and syrupy.
Arm limp, I reached out to the bedpost and pulled up my dead weight, until the liquid in my stomach came hurtling up my throat. I licked my thumb and tried to rub away the discoloured spittle I had left on the quilt. I scratched it until the end of my nail caught in a loose thread and tore off. I put my thumb to my mouth and bit at it.
I was her, like Connie had been her, and Parnella had been her. I was the frozen girl, the leech-sucked girl. I slapped about my body in search of leeches but found nothing. No suction bruises, no blood. Was that next? I listened to my breaths, each one a tuft of frost. Surely my temperature had evened by now; it had to be the room, it was the room whose bones had frozen. The photographs on the walls cast long, shape-shifting shadows that crawled across the floor and nipped at my feet. There were family portraits, wedding pictures, the Bellrose girls at the county fair with blue ribbon pies and Emma Lasalle with two marblefurred greyhounds, and everywhere the sweeping web of this whole malignant family, something dead and rotten at its centre like mould eating it from the inside out.
Chapter 29
IT WAS DARK again. I did not know if the day had come and gone, or if the night had yet to finish. I listened to the sound of footsteps nearing and fading, upstairs and downstairs, passing by the door, until there came a tap.
“Do you hear me?” A key clicked in the lock and the door inched open. “May I come in?”
Only the girl’s feet were visible. My heart seized up at the small hand wrapping around the door’s edge, but then it sagged, shapeless, back in place when the wrong girl appeared.
“Do you remember me?” Dressed in the same floral green she had been wearing beneath the orange grove, Candice Pyke held the knob with both hands behind her back as she shut the door. “Bonnie? My uncle says that’s your name. I’m Candy. Leopold’s cousin. We met — ”
“I remember you,” I said. “Did he send you?”
A pearly swath of dead skin rimmed her one damaged eye. “No. Uncle Dorian mustn’t know I’m here.”
“You’ll help me.” I clutched a fold in her dress. “You’ll bring me to my sister.”
“You understand that he can’t know,” Candy said, more firmly. “You should sit down. You don’t look right.”
A sob swelled in my voice. “What is he going to do? What is he going to do to me?”
Candy whispered to hush, sit, keep from yelling, each instruction drowning out the other. There was a stunning pop across my face, and the smack rang clear through the air. “Quiet,” she said. “Please.”
My jaw hung loose. There was a pulsing silence.
“You don’t — ” she said. “I’ll have nowhere to go if he catches me.”
“Will you help me?” I asked.
With great care, she turned the rusty doorknob. “You can’t lose sight of me. This isn’t a usual house.” She took my hand and led me out the doorway, her ear to the darkness. “The halls wind everywhere and blend together, like they’re trying to lead you inward to the same spot.” She closed the door behind us. “The doors lock automatically on both sides. Leo says they were all scared of revolts back when Parisot was built. He says everyone in the household walked around with their keys around their necks all hours of the day and night.”
We walked a short distance, her footfalls scattering around me as though she were more than one person.
“I have five keys of my own,” she said, “for important doors, like the front and back, but not many. My uncle says I shouldn’t have too many keys or I’ll get confused. There are fire escape routes, though.” She pressed her hand to the wall, feeling her way. “Doors that lock like the others, but only on one side, so you can get out just fine if you’re already in the house.”
“Do you know where they are?” I asked.
“I should hope. They’re what I’m looking for.”
Tall grey windows watched from high up the walls of the back of the house, leaving cool evening ponds of light on the hallway floor. They lay crisp and still but for a slow stir of movement just beyond their borders, a crimp in the darkness like a pleated skirt, which turned to nothing when I looked directly at it.
“Who else is here?” I asked.
“Nobody.” Candy pulled me along. “You should stay close.”
“Are you taking me to my sister?”
“The girl you asked about in my room, you mean. With a freckle by her chin . . .”
“You did see her.” I touched the soft spot below the left corner of my mouth. “Yes, a freckle right here.”
Candy’s hand floated out in front, a powdery glow to it in the moonlight. She kept it flat against the wall as we walked, running it in shapeless, scoping motions, as if measuring calibrations or checking for a pulse. “She and another brunette girl started coming over for dinner. It’s how it always starts. We all sit down, my uncle and cousin and I, like we don’t know what’s about to happen.”
Her hand roamed behind an oily blue shipwreck painting before landing on a hook and twisting free a bolt. A vertical crack of light appeared in the wall and a door pushed inward.
“Before what happens?” I asked.
I followed her through the wall into a tunnelled sunroom. It curved, dizzyingly narrow, as if wrapping around a dome. My heart burned fiery red.
We reached a potted plant on a dirty pedestal. Candy lifted the flowers — a lavish bouquet, until I noticed the glossy plasticity peeling from each leaf, the artifice of it — and placed them on the ground.
I scanned the tunnel’s walls, faded from years of unfettered sun. Visible now where the plant had been was a slim line in the long-forgotten wood. When Candy pushed against it, a milky fog of light seeped through.
“She found me one afternoon, your sister,” Candy said. “In my room out back, under the orange trees. I wouldn’t leave with her, I said I couldn’t, but — ”
“But what?”
“She said she would come back for me. Only I never saw her once after that.”
I felt the presence of my sister — her foot had touched this, her hand had rested here. Had she walked this hallway? Was she near to it now? I followed Candy through bleak wing after wing, my bare feet pattering against flagstone floors slated with dust. White plaster mouldings ached from the ceiling trim, their open mouths and weeping faces filled with shadow. I held my breath in stops and starts. I listened for any tremor of sound, but there was nothing.
“My uncle has lost everyone he loves,” Candy said. “Aunt Apollina, my mama, and their parents years before when they were children.”
“He has you and Leopold,” I said.
“He doesn’t love me and Leopold.”
As we descended a spiral staircase, Candy spoke of her cousin, how he brought bread pudding to teachers who fawned over his barley hair, kissed aunts on the cheek and stole gum from them, stole jewellery, the real delight in the trick of it all. Making another person think you cared for them, when you did not, was far more of a prize to him than a diamond hairpin or a tin of mints, or any number of gems he gave over to Candy when the fun had played itself out.
“Leo only really ever loved his mama,” Candy said, winding ahe
ad of me. “He doesn’t care a lick what his daddy does, if he knows the full truth of it.”
The end of the stairwell startled me. My foot expected to sink another level but landed abruptly on the floor.
“We’re not far,” Candy said. We had been moving slowly, the floor’s creaks catching our feet like cobwebs. “We’ll be outside soon. You can find your way home from there, can’t you?”
I shook my head. “I can’t go home without my sister.”
Candy stopped just short of the wall. “I can’t help your sister. Now come on, you haven’t got the time, believe me.” She forced me around the corner into a drawing room, where a mirror seemed to flaunt featureless dolls of our likeness. “Usually my uncle leaves this door open when he’s in there, to air it out.” She pointed. “The one by the mirror.”
I moved toward the mirror as if I meant to pass through it. Reaching out my hand, I let my fingernails clink against the glass. “My other sister, my oldest one, she’s sick at home.”
“Best you get back to her, then, don’t you think?” Candy pushed the mirror to a crooked angle. I watched as she turned a tiny brass handle, then paused. “I try to help them, you know,” she said, taking several folds of her dress up in her fists. “The girls my uncle brings. The ones who get scared and change their minds. I’ve cut myself up. I say they got hold of scissors or knives and went running. He’s taken care of me — what am I supposed to do? He could have left me for the streets, for the orphanage.”
She played with the stubborn handle until a small bolt was thrust out of place. We entered a greenhouse caped in starry night, with dark evergreen spades blotting hundreds of glass windows. Trees bowed at the ceiling, jailed in from growing higher. They reached across the glass at tortured angles.
Candy faced me. “It was never meant to happen the way it did with Suzanna.”
In a shapeless stream she spoke of Suzanna stumbling, cracking her head on a riverside rock as she ran away, splashing through the black-water swamp. Her dress bloodied as Dorian hauled her out, clutching the line of the gatortrap, smearing it as he struggled to keep above water.
“He’s the one who kills them, Candy, if they die out there,” I said. I ignored her sickly whiteness. “It’s his fault. Do you not understand that?”
“I could have gotten myself killed doing the small scraps I’ve tried to do. Uncle Dorian read in the paper about the symbols on her wrists, and he hasn’t said so but he knows it was me who did it.”
“You’re the one who wrote on her wrists,” I said.
“My uncle knows only flimsy pieces of what he learns in his travels. He talks about it, but it’s all stitched together like a shoddy quilt, it doesn’t make any sense. I think he shapes it into whatever he wants it to mean.” She took my hand and gently touched my wrist. “Protection. I read that’s what the symbol means, that’s why I drew it. I only meant to keep her safe.”
Chapter 30
I RAN FROM panel to panel, clawing through vines, scratching my hands raw.
“It’s here. I know it’s here,” Candy said.
Sweat beaded my chest. I rubbed my wrist, checking the depth of a cut slashed by a splintered branch. “How do you know?”
“Aunt Apollina showed me.” Candy’s voice was a beaten rasp like mine. “But I was little, I can’t remember. All I know is that it’s on this side.” She looked up to the peak of the wall’s height. “I know it’s on this side.”
“Let’s just break through it.”
“We can’t. It’s all bulletproof. It was meant to keep slaves and rebels out.” The greenhouse was massive, impenetrable, but beyond the glass through the stringy spill of willows, I could almost see the orange grove, the twin storm cellar doors, and the moon-spattered pine of the fence. The glass panels were identical, many of them hidden behind the broken necks of trees who refused to stop growing, some so hunched that their tallest points drooped to the ground, disappearing into a fishpond’s black glaze.
I caught the sound of trickling water. “Did you hear that?”
It continued from behind a rotting live oak.
“Is there a fountain?” I asked.
“No.” Candy’s face was stamped cold with bafflement.
Our eyes followed the sound to where wet, clipped shapes marked the cobblestone path. Beside them was a trail of glass jars, each one filled with water and spotted with fat sluggy worms.
Leeches.
Water dribbled in thin strains from a net stretched over the pond. My spine prickled. I felt Candy freeze behind me.
My breath sucked in as a hunched lump of shadow ascended and turned toward us.
Run.
Run where?
Tall hibiscus stood between us, cut-throat red.
Run anywhere.
The moon was mild, and I saw only the silver outline of the figure, his shimmering wet net, his rusty mane.
“Candy,” said Dorian. He took a step forward, and his face rose with recognition. “Miss Fayette.”
I flew through the trees, but like a wave he was on top of me, large hands forcing my arms down, hefty body, heavier than anything alive, body like iron crushing my stomach, pushing bile up my throat, his breath like dirty coffee. Candy stood as still as the stems around her, fading into the forest until she was far from sight, the darkness so dense it swallowed everything around it, pierced only by screams so shrill and clear and alien they might have shattered the glass of the greenhouse if it could have been shattered, but only crashed against it and fell back into my ears in icy cuts.
PART SEVEN
Keyholes
Chapter 31
DORIAN SCRATCHED HIS chin. “Did I hurt you? The trees did a number on you, sho’nuff. You ain’t in any pain, are you?” Despite his soft voice, his calm grey-drizzle eyes, and how his hands folded at ease on his lap, his mouth was tight. “Miss Fayette. I’m goin’ to need you to cooperate.”
I felt like a wild animal. There were blood smears on my skirt, and my hair was thrown about like a riptide had run through it.
Dorian began to approach me and I squirreled back against the wall. I covered my face, but the aged floor creaked under his shoes, and soon his hands were on me, prying my arms apart.
“Let me see your face, darling,” he said.
I ducked low behind my hair. His hand followed, fingertips landing like cold drops against my cheek.
“Ssss.” A worried hiss. “That’s quite the scrape. We’ll put some antiseptic on it once you’ve settled down.”
He had hardly gotten the words out when I dug my teeth into the swoop of flesh between his finger and thumb. My mouth stretched wide into a fiery rictus, screaming into the walls.
Dorian watched. He shook the pain from his hand.
My voice was a breathless pinch when I stopped screaming. “Do you have her?”
“You mean Constance,” he said.
I shrivelled into myself, balling up in the corner but still on my feet. “Did you hurt her?”
“I would never hurt her.”
“But you’ll abandon her, you’ll let her starve.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, never Constance.”
I felt a thick fog in my nostrils. I ran my arm under my nose and watched a streak of blood stretch up to my elbow.
“Now, missy, you listen here. You were in hysterics.” Dorian lowered himself carefully onto the bed. “I can help girls like you. Restless. Disrupted. Though I’ll say, I never meant to draw you into this, that was you, missy. You brought yourself here.”
“You brought me here.”
He ran his hand over his face as if to clear it of expression. “You’ve complicated matters, Miss Fayette.” He retrieved a flat gold case from his pocket. Its tiny latch popped and he lifted a cigarette to his mouth. “Quite significantly, you’ve complicated matters, to be truthful. My girls come willingly. I know them. They know me. They understand our friendship. Snatching you like that was without decorum, and I apologize, but you were scrou
nging through my gardens at night like a hungry rabbit.”
He gave a light laugh and lit his cigarette.
The borders of my vision burned. My girls.
An oily light cast itself against Dorian’s face. It distorted his features until he looked aged and sallow and unclean in the spoiled glow. “You’ve put me in quite the position,” he said. “Gentilly State girls are good girls. They understand where I come from. They understand where they come from. When our work is complete, they go off on their own and I don’t rightly know beyond that.”
“I won’t tell.” I moved my hands down from my face. “I won’t tell anyone about this.”
“We both know that ain’t true.” He gestured, trailing streams of smoke, toward the lone window. “The moment you’re back in town, you’re goin’ straight to that prickly ol’ sister of yours. Your mama and daddy, too. The police. Doesn’t matter who, really, you’re talkin’ to someone, and don’t bother tryin’ to convince me otherwise, ’cause you’ve got a look in your eye I know almost better than anythin’ else.” He jutted out his chin and scratched the grizzled beard. “You know, young lady, you’re the youngest girl I’ve worked with, aside from Priyasha. Little girl in the far south of Bangladesh, near the Bay of Bengal.” He tapped his cigarette over a glass tumbler on the bedside table. “It would be a lot easier to talk if you came over and sat down.”
I did not move. He spoke so kind and ordinary, it yanked the knot in my stomach until I thought it might tear.
“Missy, you can march on over of your own accord or I can pick you up and seat you here myself.”
It was like I had just learned to walk. He waited patiently. At the foot of the bed, where the peeled brass posts rose like naked flagpoles, I stopped.
Dorian glanced to the spot on the quilt next to him, then back at me. “Suit y’self.” He sighed and lifted himself from the mattress. “You ever heard of schizophrenia? Your sister said it’s what your grandmother had. Gerta? Is that right?” He was at the dresser now, reaching into the highest drawer. “Well, it’s rare that they diagnose a child with schizophrenia, but it’s what they said Priyasha had. Poor girl would hear her name whispered in the night, and go off followin’ voices. Said she saw her dead mama in the banyan trees.” From the drawer he lifted a mason jar splotched with leeches. “But Miss Fayette, here’s my secret. I don’t think that Priyasha was sick. I don’t think she was sick in the slightest.”
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