I tried to hear him through the dull thumping in my head, but his story wormed through in fragments as I watched him pull from the drawer pill bottles and shining steel tools. He said how the child bride had wailed and thrashed against her mattress until he and her father tied her down. How her eyes had rolled back into featureless white marbles, her body jumping and rattling the bedframe.
“She identified herself as her mother, you see.” He rolled his hand in the air, as if reciting lines in a play. “I am Jagriti, give me back my daughter. Let me have her. Let me have her.” He collected his retrieved items and placed them on the bedside table. The edge of his upper lip shone with a snaky trace of sweat. “Watching that — there ain’t another feeling like it. I dismissed it at the time, of course. Ascribed the feeling more to adrenaline, or shock, on my part. But I learned to see differently. Openly. Voodoo carries a sentiment, you see, that the livin’ and dead are one. United. All of us. And there’s no feeling like starin’ into the eyes of someone connected to the other side. Little pupils like keyholes. Like all of the torturous whys and hows are just beyond them, waiting to be provoked. But here’s another thing I’ve learned. You’ve got to pick the right eyes.”
His thumb grazed my cheek.
“The mind’s eyes, I mean,” he said. “The soul’s eyes, that see inside, and beyond what’s right in front of us. Someone with a crack in their mind is open. You see? Already susceptible to the world’s unseen flutters. Presences, compulsions, the dead, the demonic — people can reach all of that. But without the right eyes” — he balled up his fingers, let them spring out — “nothing. Do you see, Miss Fayette? Do you see why this is so important? But you need to go deep, deep into the mind, where the veil between one realm and the other is so thin, like light, you can pass right through it.”
He faded behind the grey spots over my eyes. “What did you do to my sister?”
The stern ridge of Dorian’s brow lowered. “If you think for one second that I would hurt that girl.”
The floor was cold against my legs as I crumpled onto it, the bedpost still in my hands. “Where is she?” I pleaded. “Where’s Connie?” My voice was strange with whimpering. My vision spun, vaguely catching Dorian unseal one of the rattling pill bottles. I started hacking air and spit onto my skirt. There was nothing in my stomach, but still it strained and pumped and heaved to empty itself. Only when Dorian yanked me by the collar did it stop. He was behind me now, his hands slapped on my jaw and prying it open. A little pill rolled against my lips. I jerked my head in every direction, writhing in his hold, his arms and legs clamped around me. Screams frothed out of me in growls as I tried to clench my teeth together, but his hands were strong, and with a horrible snap my mouth opened and his fingers stabbed inside, probing the capsule farther down.
Then it was done. Dorian rubbed my throat, and held my body still as the pill sank through my stomach and dissolved in my blood. I shivered in his arms. His sweat fell cold against my neck.
Chapter 32
“THIS BELONGED TO my wife,” Dorian said. His hand was on the back of my head, lifting it from the pillow as the chain of Connie’s necklace slipped over me. “It was a gift. An artist named Adjoa fashioned it.” He straightened the stone on my chest, aligned the chain evenly on each side. “I met her in the Ivory Coast, many years ago. It’s the symbol for the spirit who grants clairvoyance,” he said, touching the markings at the centre.
The scarlet walls wavered. Figures moved in the photographs; Apollina bouncing baby Leopold on her lap; young girls with floury hair and missing front teeth, holding wilted tulips that swung their swan-like necks in the warm current.
“We were in the Bardon Park Hotel somewhere in Abidjan. Le Plateau, I think. I can’t recall now how we got to talking. Miss Adjoa said her mother would pour gunpowder on the floor, and cornmeal, and shape it into these symbols. They represent the many loa, the Voodoo spirits who bridge the unknown world with the known. One of them wears a black hat and carries a cane, if my memory serves me. One is a serpent.” Dorian was sitting on a wooden chair by the bed. “I brought the necklace home for Apollina and she loved it for a good number of years. Then one day she simply gave it back. I don’t know if I cared to ask why. She set it right down on the garden table. Said we didn’t understand it, that we’d no right to Parisot, no right to wear the Crucifix, that it ought to burn our skin. That blood didn’t connect her family so much as pour over it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. Shadows fell from the vines outside the window and lapped up over the bedspread and against my legs. I rolled my hand over to touch one and the shadow crumbled, charred to ash.
“We need to push you closer, to the place Apollina reached. The middle of the bridge, where the known and unknown meet. Can you do that for me?” He gave the lid of the mason jar a rusty twist. “Now, I should warn you. The least effective thing you can do at the moment, Miss Fayette, is go into hysterics.” He dredged up a dark leech by its end and carried it, dripping, to my leg. “Try to stay calm, just for now, if you can.” He lifted up the hem of my skirt and slid his hand underneath.
My legs jerked. “No, don’t — ”
“Sh, it’s all right now.” He placed his other hand on my ankle. My legs were limp and could not push up against the weight. “Don’t you worry, I ain’t goin’ to hurt you.” He removed his hand, without the leech, and let my skirt fall in place. Five more times he did this before recapping the empty jar. “It’s rather an old practice. It was hardly much use for its intended purpose at the time, but it will lower your apprehensions. A state of delirium is to be sought, my dear girl, not resisted. Certainly not fixed, as is the way of thinking these days. Your sister Constance, there was never a thing wrong with her, I think you know that. She should never have been shamed for hearing the flickers in the air. You’re a reader, aren’t you, little mamzelle?”
A hard growl in my stomach, like stone against stone.
Dorian nodded toward the sound. “Fasting is integral, in my opinion, so try your best to ignore the hunger pangs. I promise you a feast when we’re done.” His hand glistened from the leech water, and his lighter’s flame lit his skin in glinting webs. “Constance said you’re a reader. She called you her little bookworm. So tell me, do you know of the Bacchanalia? They were a mystery cult in ancient Rome.”
His hand waved over my face, doubling and streaming. “Pardon the smoke,” he said, directing his breath over his shoulder. “Now, this ain’t the time of the Greco-Roman. Cults, initiations, dancin’ in drunken ecstasy. All a bit elaborate for my taste.” He batted the air, as if these euphoric dancers were mosquitoes by his ear. The smoke had gathered across the ceiling, pouring to the floor in rolling, ghostly falls. “ To search for a release from self, however — more than an indulgence of escapism, mind you, but true breaking of ephemeral binds, to reach beyond them is timeless, if you ask me. It’s a state we’ve sought, through methods of varying efficacy, surely, in every age of our existence as a species, and I think we ought to ask ourselves why.”
The soft yellow sunrise broke across the window, and a bird chirped and flitted in the vines. My hand had perspired into a slippery ball in an effort to lift itself. I glanced down to find a thin rope had been looped around my wrist and tied to the wire edge of the bedframe.
“Go right ahead, Miss Fayette.” Dorian untied the knot of rope himself and began to dig his fingers through the one on the other side. “Lot of good it’ll do you now.”
With the ropes loosened, my hands squirmed free, but I could not fully lift them. My voice came out slurred and swam in circles around my head. “Did you poison me?”
“It’ll fade soon enough. Now I need you to relax, Bonavere — may I call you Bonavere? Relax, best you can.” Dorian straightened the tie underneath his vest, and smoothed a crease in his dark green trousers. He smiled at me as though I had said something sweet. “Bonavere, if you could pass through a looking glass, like in the old story, would you?”
/> I waited as he straightened my pillow so that it better supported my neck. “I don’t know.”
“What if it were necessary? What if it wasn’t the looking glass that mattered, but the existence of those who had already broken through it?” He rested back against his chair. The low light curled around the silk hollow of his tie. “Haven’t you ever missed someone so much it didn’t matter how you found them? I think you understand that better than most.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t understand anything at all.”
“Let me tell you, darlin’, there was a time I sounded just like you. Maybe even said those same exact words.” He looked up at the ceiling and scratched his chin, his neck, his hands. “My wife believed deeply in the frailty of the veil separating us from, well, darkness, otherness, illumination. At first it amused me, her conviction. Then it worried me. Eventually it was all she did, try to speak to these spirits. I told her she was sick. Her sister and I, we talked and the doctors at Gentilly State said they could help Apollina see clearly again. But when I told her, Bonavere, she said she’d rather die than be locked up, away from the music, from dancing, from everything. And I wanted to fill her with so many drugs she’d have needed a nurse holdin’ her by the elbow like an invalid.”
Light moved through the room in waves, sweeping his hair into a blaze. His voice was filled with an almost nostalgic horror.
“Do you know what it sounds like to hear a body crack? A whole body crack at once, like the snap of a bone.” In his scratching, he had begun to peel the skin off the ball of his knuckles. “When a body falls in front of a streetcar, such a behemoth of metal . . .”
“No, sir,” I said.
“I didn’t help my wife in the way she needed me to. In a way, I no less than pushed her into the road.”
“You’re trying to speak to her?” I asked. A chill crept through me. “You’re trying to reach her through other people.”
“See, I knew that you and I were of a similar mindset,” he said, with sudden alacrity. “We’re a rare sort, you and I. We feel electricity in our fingertips. The sort who understands the push and pull of drive, of an infatuation with a cause. Magnetic molecules floating in the air. An utter absence of the cursory. There’s no stopping once a thing has started. You understand.”
“I would never hurt anyone,” I said.
“I ain’t hurtin’ anyone.” Dorian ran his palm up and down his leg. He lifted from his seat and lowered his mouth to my forehead. “You look a great deal like your sister.”
He left me alone in the red, melting room with my face pressed into the pillow. A twitch of feeling ran through my arms, and I dragged them onto my lap, taking what felt like hours to inch up my skirt. I remembered what Saul had told me and pinched the sucker of each sluggy leech to pry it off.
Blood washed over my hands. I looked down onto my skirt and a pool of red stained the tiny scorpion appliques my mother had sewn. My legs tingled with the reviving sensation of nerves, able to bend enough that I could curl into myself and ease my breaths into an even order. I grabbed the edge of the mattress and started pulling myself toward it when I heard a voice.
“Bonavere?”
I clung to the bed’s brass rail.
“Bonnie.” Its echo thinned out to something nearly recognizable. “Bonnie, is that you?”
I felt a tingle of cold sweat, sharp as pins. “That’s not real,” I said.
Connie’s tinkling laughter played around me. “Why can’t you see me, pet?” she asked. Cold hands slapped over my eyes from behind. “Is this why?”
I ran my fingers against her pebbly knuckles. My stomach went hollow. “You feel like ice.”
The hands flew off. I turned, and through the window dawn shifted its blue-pink veil until a sheer, untouched haze hung between me and the white-shadowed frame of my sister.
Everything inside of me crumbled.
“Bonnie, don’t cry.” She crossed her arms, dropped her hip. “Fritzi will tease you all day for it.”
“You look like a statue.” The glass of the window crinkled with frost. I covered my eyes. “You’re not Connie.”
“Then who am I?”
From far, far downstairs came the sounds of thumping, and dragging.
“Who am I, Bonnie?”
“Don’t act like my sister. Don’t talk like her.”
She was crying. “Bonnie? Where are you?”
Connie had a way of crying that frightened me, as though she were trying to speak but could not open her mouth. Her eyes urgent, and desperate, like all the shattered pieces behind them might come flying out.
“Stop doing that, stop crying like that,” I said.
Her mouth opened, and inside looked dry and bluish and sterile. “It’s like a deep well and all the water is coming up,” she said, resting her hand on her chest. “The water under the well, under the stone in the dirt. All of this black, earth-cold water.”
I was colder than I had ever been. Heat could not attach itself to me. “Don’t make me feel this,” I said. “Why are you so cold?”
“There is a way to live unfettered, Bonnie.”
“Why are your eyes like that?” I asked. They were coated in a faint gossamer film. My shakes were violent, sweat slipping around my body, and I staggered away from the blue imprint of my sister, blue light in her eyes, blue shadows on her face.
“Remember when Fritzi threw up a dozen pastries and Mama went pink as a grapefruit?” She looked confused, the memory coming to her from far away. The dirt spotting her dress began to crawl — blackflies twitching about her sleeves and collar.
“Stop it, stop talking like her!”
The sounds downstairs broke into a muffled but violent clatter.
I pulled the door knob, banged against the wood. “You’re not a ghost,” I told her. “Dorian said he would never hurt you.” I held my hands in front of myself, looking into the space between as if holding a crystal ball. “I believe he wouldn’t hurt you.”
Connie reached her hand out to me, tender fingers that for years had combed my tangles without it hurting, and were deft and delicate and in a state of constant movement like flitting moths. Her hair looked as dense as black coffee, but her presence was so vacant that it seemed there could not be anything to it. Only a continuous drift of absence, running from where she stood to the end of the world.
She spoke to me again, but her voice peeled off into incomprehensible echoes.
I clapped my hands over my ears. The approaching sounds grew louder. They were on the level beneath us now, turning up the stairs, a heavy object knocking against the steps.
This was not my sister. The quirky purse of a smile, pinched at the corners; the tumbling hair over her eyes; the vibrating presence, always watching you, breathing in every detail before you even realized she was there. Impish colt if you knew her, aloof as a snowflake if you did not. It was all there. My sister. But these were not the right eyes glittering darkly at me through the cold dawn curtain.
“He said he doesn’t make them stay. He said he would never hurt you.” I repeated it, again and again, my mind refusing to pierce the outer layer of its meaning, scuttling back from it like it might burn, until with sudden, daggering speed the meaning behind Dorian’s admittance crystallized in a single pillar of clarity.
Blood swept through my head and I could not lift it, I had to curl against my knees and hold my face tight in my hands. A thought sat before me, callously quiet amongst all of the other thoughts I had ransacked day in and day out for weeks, scraping and studying them until I collapsed in the middle with my eyes itchy and my brain buzzing and inflamed. Where do the lost girls go? What’s being done to them? Always the same questions, the perpetually unspooling thread that never ran out.
Where’s my sister? Where’s Connie?
But now, buried at the bottom of my mind, floating closer to the surface, came a cruel new thought: Nobody, not even Dorian, knows.
Chapter 33
THE NOISE
FROM downstairs reached the end of the hall. I lay flat on my stomach under the bed. If I lifted my chin from the floor, grazed my scalp against the box-spring, I saw Leopold’s cherubic pucker in an old beach photograph, arm wrapped possessively around who I assumed, from the freckles and the bright curling hair, to be Candy.
I burrowed my head in my arms.
The footsteps were not swift like Dorian’s. They lacked an ease of navigation, as if lost. Nor were they Candy’s soft, nervous tiptoe. Accompanying them was a harrowing thud. I could not reach for the necklace, Dorian had slipped it away again. I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from crying small sounds of terror. So much dust, and clumps of hair, and dead insects crumbling into black spots on the floor. I tried to breathe through my collar but a waft of debris flew to the back of my throat and soon I was coughing in a noisy fit, my head thrown back painfully into the bottom of the box-spring.
The footsteps halted. I had sounded an alarm. They turned quickly and started for the scarlet bedroom, pausing on the other side of its door. The knob shook until it dropped, loose in its socket. There came a hefty thwack through the centre of the wood. Metal gleamed through the widening gap; it hit with a force so blunt and swift that I thought my bones were cracking open. I watched from under the bed as the door peeled away, and the rusty axe from the shed in Dorian’s yard made its way through the splitting planks.
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