"You're stronger than you know."
"I'm not strong. I look at these walls and I think that I ought to be able to crush them with some of the thoughts I'm thinking. I ought to be able to blow a hole right through that wall and into the other room. She and Roger are probably sitting there drinking tea and playing cards. I'd like to smash a hole right through the wall and blow stones all over their dining table. Sorry to disturb your game, I'd say, but I just wanted to remind you that I exist. I'm still here! You're not saying anything, Isla. You think I should give her some more time, don't you?"
"I don't think anything of the sort, but it's not what I think that matters. I'm just keeping you company until you decide what to do next."
The door was open. Matilda strode into the room. She'd made Sarah look so different. At first, she thought that Matilda had cut Sarah's hair, but to her relief she realised that she was wearing it tied back in a ponytail. It made her look business-like, almost severe, and she was wearing worn jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, not folded neatly, but really shoved up the arms. Scrunched. Sarah didn't scrunch, not when she was in charge.
She had not only caught the sun, but was sunburnt on her forehead and arms. How could she have been so careless? Precious goods and all that. Twelve careful owners.
To Lara's horror, she noted that Matilda was wearing Wellington boots. They made an awful sound as she marched across the floorboards.
What on earth had she and Roger been doing out there for three days?
Sarah's eyes were bright and shining, as if lit from within. The life in them seemed incongruous with everything she had heard about Matilda. This was a woman who finally had what she wanted. Lara had felt that way once.
What on earth had Matilda and Roger been doing out there?
"Who were you talking to?" Matilda said with her hands on her hips, some of the old ice returning to her eyes.
"No-one," Lara said. "There's no-one here but me. You should know that, seeing as how you haven't visited for three days."
"I've been busy; being you, being Sarah, being me."
"Congratulations, it must be awful."
Matilda looked at her carefully, but her gaze was unrewarded. There was nothing to see. She was a stool after all. All she had was her tone of voice.
"You know that Isla's dead, don't you?" Matilda said. "The mirror broke. She's gone."
"I felt it. We all did. You don't need to remind me."
"You can take comfort in her memory. She was a good one. But don't let it go further than that. You've got to hold it together."
Lara glared at her, but again there was nothing to see. Just a stool in need of a dust and a varnish. A change of location. Eventual freedom.
"It's going to happen soon," Matilda whispered. "It's here."
"What's here?"
"My chest," Matilda grinned. "Roger accepted the delivery while I was out. I've not even unpacked it yet. We're going to put it in here."
"And we're going to switch?"
Matilda smiled, but she looked sad.
"Yes," she said. "Just like I said we would. We'll work out a schedule and we'll switch."
Lara knew that it was impossible to keep her thoughts from Matilda. Only Matilda and Isla had developed that ability to block the others out and only Matilda had the ability to prevent the others from accessing her mind. It was quite a trick and Lara knew that she could have done with it right then. Her obvious distrust was no foundation for a sharing relationship.
"No," Matilda said, seeing her thoughts clearly no matter how she tried to hide them. "But honesty is. The mind reading is a curse sometimes, but for us it could be a gift."
"Since I'm being honest," Lara said, "you might as well know that I don't think you need me. You're holding all the cards. Why would you let me out?"
"Because I know what loneliness is like."
Lara snorted.
"I don't need to be able to read your mind, to know that you're lying. You don't do anything that isn't in your own interest."
Matilda tightened her lips. They quivered with anger.
"It shouldn't matter to me what the others said about me or what you think, but for some reason it does. I want to show you that I'm not what they said I was. True, I'm not like the others. I'm not even like other people. But I'm not evil. I'm going to show you, and then you can go to hell. I'm going to let you out of there, because I said I would and I'm true to my word. This cottage, this body, Roger, it's all nothing without that."
"Fine," Lara said. "Then let's do it now. Show me now."
Matilda's face dropped.
"Why all the delay? If you've got something to prove to me, then now's a good time."
"Now I'm delaying, because I don't like being told what to do."
"Whatever excuse works for you best," Lara said.
Matilda got up from her crouching position.
"Okay," Matilda thought. "Let's do it now. Are you even ready for this?"
Lara felt herself as a glyph of panic.
"Yes," she lied pointlessly. "I mean, as ready as I need to be. Do it now. Let's switch. I'll switch back, I promise. I'll do whatever you say. I'm ready."
"Okay," Matilda said solemnly, as if she were giving the order to detonate a bomb. "I'll go and get it. We'll do it in here. This will be the changing room."
She walked out.
"You sort of lost it at the end there," said Isla.
"Is she really going to switch with me now?"
"We'll see, won't we?" said Isla.
"She knows I'm talking to you," said Lara.
"No," Isla said. "She knows you're talking to yourself. I'm dead."
"Don't keep saying that."
"She's had her own brush with madness," Isla said. "The fact that you're talking to your dead sister is either going to turn her against you or it'll give you something in common."
"I can't think about that right now. I don't want to."
She didn't like the way that Matilda listed Roger among her possessions. She didn't even like him a week ago. Now he was number two on her list.
"Will you talk to me when you're in the body?"
Lara said nothing.
"See? You only want me when you need me. You're not so different to Matilda. You two ought to be just fine."
When Lara still didn't respond, Isla's voice wound up again: "It's okay," the voice said. "I'm not hurt. I'm not real, you see?"
"Okay," Lara said distantly.
She heard voices and then she could hear that Matilda and Roger were coming towards the room.
Oh Roger! It was good to hear his voice. How she loved his voice. Even now, she felt as though he were the centre of her universe, and accordingly everything had been so far off kilter without him.
Matilda entered first, moving backwards.
"Watch the jamb," she ordered.
As someone who didn't like being told what to do, she had an affinity with giving orders.
"Yes, ma'am," Roger said, confirming Lara's thinking that Matilda had made Sarah look like a headmistress. A headmistress who mucked out pigs on a farm. Enough of that. Once she had the body back, she'd give Roger a big kiss and then she'd rush up ... or along to the bathroom. She wasn't sure where the bathroom was, but she'd make her exploration look natural and then she'd get clean. She'd wash the Matilda off her and start again.
Matilda glanced at her, reading her thoughts.
"I'm sorry," Lara thought. "I can't help it. I'm desperate, that's all."
Matilda concentrated on manoeuvring the chest into the room.
"We can put her down if you want," Roger said.
"No," said Matilda and she kept backing into the room until he was in too, catching his fingers on the door jamb and wincing, but shaking his head to say that it was nothing and Matilda let him carry on, instead of nursing his poor hands. She didn't have him set it down in the middle of the room. Instead, it went near the window, on the far side of the bed, flush against the wall where Roger almo
st trapped his fingers again.
"Good?" Roger said.
"Great," Matilda said.
She stood back and looked at it for a while. It was still covered in packing material to protect the surfaces.
"Ready for the unveiling?" Roger asked.
Matilda nodded and set to work.
"I'll do it," she said when Roger tried to help. He knew to let her get on with it. She tore the packaging from the chest as though she were unwrapping a gift on Christmas morning, and then there it was. A big, old chest with a botched leg. Three scratched drawers and rattly, dull handles, a coffin and a cradle all at once.
Roger lit up a cigarette.
"Why's this one so important to you?" he asked gently.
"You mean why did I spend a fortune transporting this ugly thing that we don't even need when everything else went into storage?"
"I mean, why is this special?"
"It's not," Matilda said. "That's why I like it. It's not special and it's not beautiful and it doesn't quite fit anywhere. I feel protective of it."
"It is special," Roger said. "If you like it, then it's special."
He left her to it then. Matilda ran her fingers over its surfaces, checking for new damage. It was so battered that only she would be able to tell if any new mishap had occurred to it while being transported.
She kept her back to Lara the whole time. Lara pressed forward, but her thoughts were guarded. It had become a habit with Matilda, but she couldn't help thinking that it was deliberate right now. She could have let her defences down if she had wished.
She was still stroking the chest when Roger returned to the room. He was carrying two glasses.
"Whisky?" he said.
"Yes."
They drank to safe arrival while holding each other's gaze and grinning, then Matilda went back to examining the chest. She pulled out the drawers with some effort and then shoved them back into place, the ugly handles tapping against the wood. Then she stood and let her hand rest on the top of the item as though it were her child and she were communing with it. When she didn't move for a long time, it became less child-like and more like a headstone. Communing she was.
"I'm glad for you," Lara said. "Take as long as you need. Then, when he's gone, we'll switch."
Matilda half-turned towards her, but her mind remained closed to her.
Realising that all attention was on her, she went back to stroking the top of the chest, with both hands now.
"You're giving me ideas," Roger said.
He downed his drink in one and set it on the small folding table before sidling up behind Matilda and wrapping his arms around her. She must have been lost in thought, because she let him do it. She let him run his hands along her hips and kiss her neck, exposed by the pony tail.
"How about I check you for damage?" Roger suggested. "Where do you hurt? How can I fix you?"
To Lara's surprise, Matilda tilted her head back towards Roger and he moved his hands up towards her breasts, pushing himself against her like a horny teenager and she was letting him do it.
"Enough," Lara thought, but Matilda showed no sign of dissuading him. Lara didn't dare wonder how far she was going to let him go and she wondered how many times something like this had happened while she had been trapped in here or in the boot of the car. She and Roger were still newlyweds. He probably expected it every day.
Matilda's hands were planted on the chest while she sank against Roger who was holding her up with the firmness of his body. He was still kissing her neck, which Lara had never liked. In addition to being a precursor to further intimacy for which she'd never quite been ready, it was ticklish and thus uncomfortable and it had been wetter than she would have expected and thus unpleasant, like plopping something sweet into your mouth only to discover that it was a pickled onion. It wasn't inherently unpleasant, but it was the divide between expectation and reality that set her on edge.
Matilda turned and Lara thought that at last she was going to push him away.
"If you wanted to show your power," Lara thought, "you've done it. In spades. You win. You're in charge."
Matilda gasped and in the next instant she and Roger were kissing. It happened so quickly that Lara couldn't process who had kissed who. She assumed it must have been Roger, because he thought that he was kissing Lara, but whatever the case ... whatever the case Matilda was showing no signs of stopping. She was kissing him back.
It was a passionate kiss of the type that she had seen in movies and had yearned for herself, where principle characters kissed as if it were both forbidden and the last thing that they would ever do, and as if there were a clock counting down the seconds until it would have to end. They were in a hurry for each other. They were an explosion of hands and tongues and lips. He unbuttoned her shirt.
"No. Matilda! No!"
She was helping him, thrusting her breasts at him as she leaned back against that fucking chest. He had her shirt open in a few seconds and she wasn't even wearing a ... he put his mouth to her breasts and she threw her head back. She looked ungainly, trying to wrap her legs around him while trying to maintain balance and him thrusting against her through his trousers like he hadn't figured out the mechanics of how this was supposed to work. It was a sham of all she had seen in the movies.
"Stop it now, Matilda," Lara said quietly, but of course Roger couldn't hear her and Matilda showed no sign of listening. "It's not too late to stop this now."
She was rubbing her hands in his hair as he went down and unbuckled her belt.
She could avert her eyes, but she couldn't stop hearing Matilda's sighs. She was panting and whispering, just one word, over and over.
"Yes ... yes ... yes ..."
Roger was grunting like an animal. A pig. A dog. A filthy animal in mindless pursuit of ... oh God.
She looked.
She saw a tangle of legs. For a second, she thought that Matilda had changed her mind and that they were now fighting, but they were both whispering to each other now, as if they were making some ridiculous attempt at being discreet.
Matilda was talking dirty to him. She said something that Lara would never have said to anyone, perhaps not even Roger and then she was bending over the chest with Roger ...
"Noooo!"
The last of the light died on Matilda's face as Roger entered her, like the dog that he had become. She splayed her arms to either side and flattened her breasts against the top of the chest, facing away.
Roger grabbed her disgusting pony tail as he moved behind her, as if they were reigns and he were riding her.
Lara couldn't watch any more.
There were no tears, because there was no body.
Perhaps there never would be.
She didn't want there to be.
Not now.
The noises went on and on. A rhythmic slapping sound and that fucking chest banging against the wall. Damn it.
She had heard how Matilda had moved the axe with her mind. It had leapt into her hand from inches away. And together the sisters had tried to decapitate the removal men, but Matilda had stopped them without breaking a sweat. If Lara had had half of Matilda's power, she would have lifted the chest into the air and crushed them beneath it. She'd have brought it down repeatedly until she had crushed their two bodies into one.
No, not Roger. He was innocent. He didn't know that he wasn't touching Lara. He thought that he was making love, but he was only fucking.
"Oh, that's so good," Roger gasped.
If she'd had half of Matilda's power, she'd have shattered the window and carved them both up like meat.
When she looked up again, they were both naked, aside from Roger's socks. The things you notice. The things that stay with you and poke you in the ribs when you're all alone in the dark. He was lying on his back on the single bed, his bare skin against the bare mattress, while Matilda climbed over him, positioning herself with her legs astride his pelvis.
"You fucking bitch! I hate you. I fucking hate you!
"
"Yes ... Yes ..."
This next went on for a long time. Lara hoped that the bed would break. Perhaps some errant shard would penetrate the mattress and spear them both.
She would have liked to see the look on Matilda's face then, but only then.
Lara felt a twisting in her stomach. The things that hurt you even when they're not there.
"When I get out of here," she vowed, "I'm going to kill you."
It had been a slow fire burning inside her. It had almost gone out several times, but now it had everything it needed to thrive. It had fuel to consume and though it felt like there was no oxygen in the room, it seemed to have that too.
Something came over then. More a sensation than a thought. If it could have been expressed in words it would have been to the effect that she was willing to let those flames consume her if it meant that they would consume Matilda too.
*
When it was over, it got worse.
Isla had told her a story once, about a little girl who had woken one night to a strange sound coming from the bottom of the bed. In the impenetrable darkness, she had imagined what it might be. An insect came to mind, in which case it was probably huge. A beetle, chomping away at the wood to take supplies back to its home or otherwise it was eating something, perhaps cannibalising another beetle of the same size, tearing off its wings and cracking its shell with its mandibles. It could have been a leaking pipe. That would have made sense from that location as there was an old radiator attached to the wall there and it did like to creak and crack in the night when it was set to go off and again in the morning when it would make a much-awaited resurgence, but it seemed to have more purpose than that. Whatever it was it was alive, not mechanical.
Her mind had settled on the idea - no matter that it was ridiculous - that it was a finger, disembodied from its owner, tapping at the bottom of the bed like a morse code. It would stop just long enough for her to almost fall back to sleep and then it would commence its tapping once again and she'd feel the hairs standing up on the back of her neck.
Wake up. Wake up.
Tap-tap-tap.
Let me in. Let me under the covers. I'm so cold out here. It's so cold.
She spent the night in a half-dream, her thoughts full of fingers and blood and that unrelenting tapping for attention.
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