Her face appeared like a mirage behind her hair and she gazed at me for a moment, transfixed. Under the bandage on her left cheek, I could make out the large carving wound again; it looked like a piece of raw meat, the edges clotted with dried blood and tissue. I opened my mouth, my lips forming a word, but nothing came out.
“Talk to her.” Dominic’s voice sounded tremulous in my ear. His fingers squeezed mine. “Say her name again.”
“Cassie, it’s Marin.” I tried to steady my voice. “I’m here again, like you asked. Do you remember?”
Without warning, the girl’s blue eyes rolled up inside her head. For a split second, her pupils vanished, a cloudy whiteness filling the void. Her eyelashes fluttered, tiny wings desperate to take flight, and then they rolled back down again, settling on me with an eerie deliberation. My blood seemed to freeze as I tried to understand what I was seeing. These were not Cassie’s eyes looking out at me any longer. These eyes were reptilian, glossy and hooded, the pupils dark and cylindrical instead of round.
I took a step back, whimpering, pulling on Dominic’s hand.
“No, it’s okay.” Dominic was holding my hand so hard it hurt. “Just say her name one more time, Marin. Maybe it’ll help.”
I shook my head, pushing at him now, trying to twist my hand out of his grip. “No, I can’t. Please! Let me go!”
A terrible giggling drifted out from the corner, a throaty cackle that got louder, filling the air in the room with dread. The hairs on my neck stood up, and I could hear the sharp intake of Dominic’s gasp.
“That’s the laugh,” he whispered. “That’s the one I heard that night. In the kitchen.”
“We have to get her back in bed.” Miss Peale strode across the room, sounding both irritated and frightened. “Right now.”
Dominic dropped my hand as Miss Peale reached for his sister. He followed her lead, grabbing Cassie’s feet as she took the girl’s arms. The strange laughter dissolved into shrieks as they carried her across the room, Cassie’s body writhing and twisting under their hold. She arched her back and threw back her head, shoving her legs in and out like pistons, struggling to break loose. The awkward movements caused Dominic to drop her feet, and he moved in quickly, desperately, to grab them again. Somehow, the two of them got her back into bed, pinning her down against the mattress and then holding her with their arms.
“Keep her down on your side!” Miss Peale barked. “I’ve gotta tie her arm down over here.”
It was hard to know if Cassie heard she was going to be tied down or if she had run out of energy and decided to relinquish the fight. But she suddenly stilled, a decision so immediate and unexpected that everyone, including Miss Peale, took a step back. Cassie lay there for a moment on the mattress, limp and unmoving. The restraint closest to Dominic still hung down on the side of the bed, forgotten.
“Cassie?” Miss Peale said her name as the girl sat up in the bed. She looked disoriented, confused. “Cassie, honey, what is it?” If she heard the nurse’s question, Cassie gave no indication of it. She began to breathe hard again, her nostrils flaring, as if something was building itself up inside. A murky gray thread appeared behind her eyes, snaking between the spaces inside her skull. I watched as it morphed into a rich blackness, the thickest, deepest absence of light I had ever seen, ten times blacker than her fingertips had been the night before, one hundred times deeper than what I had seen in the hospital. It filled every crevice inside her brain, swallowing the tiniest of cells, obliterating them one by one from sight. It was so deep that it was not even a color. Or a shape.
It was more of a thing, a presence.
“What’s going on?” Miss Peale’s voice was sharp again. “What’s that on her neck?”
The right side of Cassie’s neck had begun to swell, as if being pushed at with a fist from the inside. Slowly, a section of skin morphed into a small, round shape. Inch by inch, it grew, expanding to the size of a golf ball, and then a peach, before it seemed to stop, hovering just a few inches below her jawbone. The skin around it was as taut as a drum, the edges ringed with red. Cassie reached toward us with her one free arm, the fingers on her hands twisting like claws. She opened her mouth wide, as if she might scream, and then closed it again without a sound.
“What’s happening?” Dominic shouted. “Is she choking?”
“I’m getting the Risperdal.” Miss Peale raced over to the dresser on the other side of the room and grabbed a syringe. She watched Cassie with one eye as she held up the needle, flicking at the bottom half with a shaking fingernail.
The other side of Cassie’s neck began to twitch and then swell. “Mariiiiiinn …,” she whispered. Her voice sounded far away, as if trapped inside a box. “Mariiiiiinn …”
Miss Peale lunged at the girl, grabbing her wrist and plunging the needle deep into the muscle of her upper arm. Cassie did not turn her head, did not even blink.
“Mariiiiinn …” Her voice was a wheeze, the last fragment of air being pushed from her lungs.
“Oh my God.” Dominic’s voice was louder. “She can’t breathe! Help her, Marin. Please!”
I took a step forward, an inch closer, my eyes still on Cassie’s neck, which was distorted now beyond description, but she recoiled at the movement as if I had touched her with an electrical current. The sinewy blackness seemed to be bleeding now, oozing its way behind the features of her face, swallowing the insides of her throat. It dipped lower, spreading like a wave into the tops of her shoulders, her lungs, her heart.
“Cassie?” My lips shook.
She gazed at me for half a second with her terrible eyes and then lifted her hand to point at me. “You can do nothing to me,” she said. The faraway whisper in her voice was gone, replaced now with a new, gravelly voice that sounded warped, as if she was speaking in slow motion. “Nothing!”
I felt faint, listening to the sound coming out of Cassie’s mouth, my fear a tangible thing now holding me by both shoulders. And yet just like in the hospital, I could not stop staring, could not tear my eyes away from the horrific image. My eyes did not blink. They could not. Riveted, I remained where I was, locked in a nightmare of unbearable proportions.
Cassie continued to stare at me, the blackness inside of her seething. Her eyes darted first to the right and then to the left. All at once, she dropped her head and clutched one side of it with her free hand. She rocked back and forth in the bed, pulling at her hair, and then stopped. Without lifting her head, she pointed at me again and began to scream. “Why do you keep looking at me? Stop it! You’ll kill me! You’ll kill me!”
I staggered backward, gasping for breath, the fear like a claw making its way up the back of my throat, siphoning off breath. What was happening now? Nothing made sense anymore. Hadn’t Dominic said that she wanted to see me, that she derived some kind of comfort from my presence in the room? I wasn’t helping at all. In fact, it looked like I was only making things worse.
Cassie flung herself against the bed; sprawled out on her back, her arms and legs beginning to flail like pieces of a broken windmill. Miss Peale was on top of her again, her mouth pinched in a tight line, struggling to tie her down. Cassie screamed and cursed. “Get out! Stop looking at me! Get out of here before you kill me!”
I moved back. Way, way back, past Miss Peale and Cassie and Dominic, into the corner, where I slumped down, pressing myself into the tiny space. If I could have, I would have merged somehow through the wall. Anything to get out of here. Anything to forget the ghastly scene unfolding before my eyes.
“Get out!” she continued to scream, although there was a desperation to it now, a begging tone that had not been there before. “Please,” she moaned. “Please just leave me alone.”
It took a full five minutes for Cassie to settle down again. Even after the screaming stopped, her fingers and legs continued to twitch, as if ridding themselves of the last of her energy until she was still again, a tangle of limp limbs beneath Miss Peale. Like a tide ebbing, the blackness left
her body, a swirl of movement down a drain. Her panting slowed, and after another few seconds, her eyes refocused, the pupils shrinking back to their normal size.
“Is she …?” Dominic started.
“Give me a minute.” Miss Peale’s voice was tight. “Let her relax all the way. I don’t know if she’ll start up again.”
The room was silent for several moments, the only sound the deep intakes of Miss Peale’s and Cassie’s breathing.
“All right,” Miss Peale said. She cradled Cassie like a baby in both arms, repositioning her against the pillows. “I think this one’s over.”
Dominic ran to her. “Cassie,” he said.
With great effort, Cassie lifted her head off the pillow and looked around the room, her head hanging low against her chest. Her eyes drifted, unfocused, as if she were drunk, pausing only when she caught sight of me, still hovering in the corner.
For a full minute, she stared at me without saying anything. Even from across the room, I could see the normal blue of her eyes again, and then a blur as they filled with tears.
“Marin,” Cassie whispered. It was her regular voice, verging on the edge of a sob. “Oh God, Marin, you’re here.”
Eleven
Cassie wept with abandon, her face a picture of anguish. She tried to stretch an arm toward me, but the restraints made it impossible for her to move it more than a few inches. “Marin,” she whimpered. “Please, come here. Help me.”
But I didn’t move. What in God’s name had just happened? Were my eyes, my ears, all of my senses deceiving me? I searched Cassie’s face, straining to see something—anything at all—still lurking there inside her head, but there was nothing. Was the blackness really gone? Was whatever had just happened really over?
The veins along the outside of Cassie’s neck tightened as she tried to lift her head some more, but there was no sign of the softball-sized shapes that had been there, no trace of any distortion at all along the smooth slope of skin. “Please,” she whispered, still stretching her fingers in my direction. “Marin.”
Was it really safe? Cassie looked like a baby, a toddler who had been punished and was pleading for forgiveness. But was it just a trick? Another ruse to get me closer so that she could hiss at me again, spit curses in my direction?
“It’s okay now, Marin.” Dominic was beckoning me forward with his hand. “She can’t move out of the restraints, and the Risperdal is starting to work. She’s calm. It’s all right.”
I got up, moving toward her on wooden legs, and then stopped a foot away from the bed. Cassie’s face, splattered with drops of saliva, was still pink from exertion. The figure eight on her cheek looked darker, as if the scabs had loosened and bled during her outburst, and the white bandages around her arms were unraveling.
I stretched out my hand until it came into contact with Cassie’s, but it was not until my fingers closed around the other girl’s that she began to cry. Her body heaved up and down as she wept, taking in air, breathing in oxygen. “Marin, don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.”
I struggled to wrap my head around everything that had just happened. First of all, what was the blackness I kept seeing inside Cassie? And secondly, where had it gone? Was it just hibernating again, the way it obviously had since I’d seen her in the hospital, waiting to emerge when it needed to? What made it come out? And then withdraw again?
“Cassie.” I pulled back a little and lowered my hand. “Is that really you?”
“It’s me.” Cassie’s voice was a whisper, but it broke on the word me. “Oh, Marin, please don’t leave. When you’re here, I can’t feel it anymore. It’s gone. She’s gone.” She was breathing hard again, but her eyes were still the same clear blue, the voice definitively hers. The muscles inside her face relaxed as her sobbing slowed. She smelled like sweat and body odor, and despite my terror, I reached out and touched her hair.
“Who is ‘she’?” I asked, just as I had in the hospital. “Who are you talking about, Cassie?”
“I don’t know.” The girl was starting to panic again. “But when I see you, she leaves. The pain leaves.” She talked quickly, as if running out of time. “You’re the only one who can take it away. Don’t go.” She clutched at my arm. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone with her again. Please.”
She had to be wrong. Nothing I had just done—or didn’t do—could have had any effect on such a situation. The fact that I had been here was just a coincidence. A fluke. None of it had anything to do with me. “I won’t leave,” I whispered, sitting down on the bed next to her. “I’ll stay.”
Cassie’s head lolled to one side at my words. Her whole body trembled, and her breath emerged in raspy gasps. She shuddered once, something catching and then releasing deep inside her throat. For a full five minutes, she remained like that, silent, pressed up against me. Maybe the Risperdal was working after all. Or maybe she was just exhausted from the events that had just transpired. Whatever it was, it did not take long before I recognized the sound of deep, measured breathing. I looked over at Miss Peale, who nodded. “She’s asleep,” she mouthed.
I got up as slowly as I dared, extricating Cassie’s hold on me with gentle hands, and lay her back down on the pillow. The skin on her face was a milky white, as if she had just come in from the cold, and her mouth was parted, the lips loose and slack. Ragged strands of her hair hung down against her chest, and the terrible carving on her cheek flickered beneath the bandage. I felt a tugging inside, a pain that made my eyes fill with tears, which made no sense at all after everything this girl had put me through, but there it was.
“Come on,” Dominic whispered. “Let’s let her sleep now.”
He pushed through the door first and then stood there for a moment, his back to me, and lowered his head. For a full moment, his shoulders rose and fell as he pressed his thumb and forefinger along the inner corners of his eyes, and I wanted to go to him, I did, but then I remembered how I hadn’t wanted anyone around me after Mom died, not even the people I loved the most. Their presence hurt physically, as if the part of her she had taken away from me was still with them. I couldn’t bear it.
He turned back around after another moment, wiping his face with the back of his wrist. Without moving, he met my eyes. Held them for a moment. “Sorry,” he said.
“Please don’t say that. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
He nodded. “You okay?”
“I think so.”
“Did you see those …?” He winced, bringing his fingers to his neck.
I nodded.
“What were they?”
“I don’t know. But they went away after she calmed down.”
He nodded again, his eyes sweeping the rug beneath his feet. “And that laugh …” He looked up. “You heard it, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you. That’s what I heard that night. In the kitchen. The same exact thing.” He tilted his head to one side. “It’s not just me, is it? I mean, I wasn’t imagining it. That wasn’t her voice, was it?”
“It didn’t sound like her.”
He ran a hand through his hair and rolled his shoulders back as if shaking off some last vestige of fear. “Well, at least she’ll sleep now. She’ll be out for a while too. That stuff they give her could flatten a horse.”
“Good.”
He hesitated as I looked at my watch. “You need to go, probably.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take you home.”
But I lingered as he moved past me, something still tugging inside.
“Marin?” He turned around.
“What do you think it is?” I didn’t want to know, and yet a part of me already did. Still, I needed to hear someone else say it. I needed to hear him say it.
Dominic pushed his hands inside his pockets. He took a deep breath and then let it out, a loud whooshing sound. “I think when she said those weird words in the closet that day, when she was holding your hand and trying to get our grandm
other to talk to her …” He paused, wincing. “I think it worked. I mean, I think my grandmother’s spirit came into that room. And then it must’ve moved into her.” He lifted his head. He looked drained, as though he hadn’t slept in days; the hollows beneath his eyes were shrouded with faint circles. “You heard her just now, right? When she was describing it. She used the word she. It can’t be anything else. That’s gotta be what happened.”
“You … I mean, you really think it’s your grandmother’s spirit in there …?” I could barely bring myself to finish the sentence. “I mean, in her?”
“Yeah.” Dominic’s face was anguished. “I do. And we’ve got to find a way to get it back out because for some reason, it’s torturing my sister. Maybe it’s upset at being trapped inside Cassie’s body. Maybe it doesn’t know how to get back out. I don’t know.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Oh my God, I don’t know how any of this shit works.”
I could hear the tremor in his voice, a shaking that I knew my own voice would assume if I said anything else, and so I took his hand instead, holding it between both of mine. The gesture was as natural as his had been, maybe even more so, and I cupped his big fingers inside my palm and pressed them against mine.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“I know.” Dominic made no movement to adjust his hand, except to squeeze mine more tightly. “So am I.”
Twelve
We went out to a sun porch on the side of the house, an enormous room with a white floor and three ceiling fans spinning overhead, so we could sit and talk. I followed Dominic’s lead, collapsing next to him on a white wicker couch with lemon-colored cushions. Palm plants rose up from stone pots in each corner, and crisp eyelet curtains hung over the windows. The air smelled like oranges and fabric softener, and I wished that I could lay my head down and go to sleep. I wondered if I would ever be able to fall asleep again after everything I’d just seen. Would Cassie?
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