The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  I’ve never seen so many Others in one place—have never had the courage to mull around them, I should say. But I force myself to look and listen. To be aware. To stop imagining. It’s only then that I notice: There are no bodies in the beds at all. The shrimpy lumps are made of sheets.

  Silvina, Christina, Diana, Mariella, and Luciana are sitting on the floor behind Silvina’s bed, clapping their hands together. They’re playing a twisted version of patty-cake, or something slap-centric like that. Silvina’s cheeks look chapped and red.

  Mariella stands, cross-eyed, and does a rickety cartwheel, her black hair flapping into her mouth. She gives a strange, desperate peal of a laugh and stands on her hands, then her fingertips themselves, teetering with an athleticism I haven’t seen outside of Olympic gymnastics.

  Christina gnashes and sucks at chocolate-covered fingers as if they are cobs of corn.

  Diana brushes at her hair as if pulling weeds from roots and flings the clumps of unruly strands across the carpet like confetti. Her face is peaceful. Her face is dead, even though her limbs vibrate with tense energy.

  And Luciana. Luciana crawls on her hands and knees with agonizing slowness toward the window overlooking the ice, raking the carpet with her fingernails, eyes rolled back into her head. Half-moon fragments of her nails wedge into the rug along her path—as if she’s so desperate to move forward and to hold herself back at the same time.

  These are not normal girls.

  These are Others acting out, no longer content with feeding and haunting alone.

  Is this who I am, too? A fool playing in a meat shell, shunting off another soul?

  I float away, meandering past the other teachers’ rooms. Only to find more Others still.

  Most of the teachers sleep on as the creatures explore the threads of their subconscious, testing each for valuable energy. But there’s one anomaly: The hawk-nosed teacher lies in bed, eyes wide open and unblinking, mouth open in terror as an Other picks its way through her skull like an old white guy picking through a quail carcass with his teeny-tiny mother-of-pearl-handle silverware.

  She is aware of what’s happening. Like an unanesthetized patient. Paralyzed. Conscious throughout a surgery. I try to push him off, and I’m met with powerful resistance. You won’t be joining this country club. When I feel other threads clinging to me, probing for energy, I push away.

  I heave onto the ground, expelling nothing for the thousandth time. I tell myself she cannot feel a thing, even with her eyes open. Some people sleep like that. Narcoleptics. But I know it’s not true.

  Charon’s been lying to me with his claims that feeding doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lying to me. Weaving together lies as tight as my crystal strings are now bound around Dom’s flesh.

  What’s more frightening still is that outside of Dom, on nights like this, I question what I am. My senses and sense of self fail me, pitching me into complete darkness. I can’t wait to be back inside of him again tomorrow, my crystals wrapping him like tangled nanoscale Christmas lights that only I can see and celebrate. The world around us dark and encircled by broken teeth of ice.

  11

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, MAY 1978

  We receive word at breakfast one morning that Mrs. Hawk has left the house for good. Carmela announces in between sips of coffee that Mrs. Hawk wished to pursue another opportunity—corporatespeak for no proper explanation shall be given. Mole tells me behind a hand that Mrs. Hawk had problems with her heart and hurried away on the first supply boat out; Lamb swears no boat arrived or left, as he spent dawn by the ice, enjoying the cool air before the fog rendered such a pleasure impossible. Despite the inconsistencies in the rumors, the whispers subside as soon as a brisk prayer for her health is said and buttery platters of softly scrambled eggs emerge from the kitchen. I eye my fellow teachers and Carmela as they chatter for the rest of the breakfast hour, privately wondering how we can carry on with our days like nothing at all has passed.

  I tell myself my shock isn’t warranted. Mrs. Hawk might have been planning her leave privately with Carmela for some time. But when I peek into her room after breakfast, some of her possessions remain, and a member of the cleaning staff roams, vigorously disinfecting every surface with a foul-smelling liquid. A simmering anxiety fills me.

  “She was fine only last week, wasn’t she?” I whisper to Yesi as we venture down to class. “Could it be—?”

  “Swamp, as someone obsessed with developing fantasies, I have to say, what’s the use in inventing one in this case, when it’s obvious she’d had her fill of this place?” she asks me, shaking her silver head. She links her arm in mine. “She was old, Swamp. Not everyone is up for the adventure,” she adds, pinching my wrist affectionately. “Her loss.”

  I suspect Yesi’s quickness in processing the news has to do with her assuming the woman’s literature duties. But I cannot sweep Mrs. Hawk out of my head so easily. The chemical stink of her vacant room pervades every corner of my memory. I wonder, for the briefest of moments, if the old virus afflicting the house has returned and Mrs. Hawk and Sara were the first to be affected. If this were the case, perhaps Carmela would hustle Mrs. Hawk out of the house under cover of darkness to shield the rest of us from that knowledge. But Sara remains here, and I am told she is recovering.

  So I cannot allow myself to dwell on these morbid fantasies.

  * * *

  Later that day, I race to make dinner with the group—sliced beef and onions, plus potato croquettes—sliding into my chair as everyone’s about to begin, and I nearly fall back off when I see a goblet filled with real, blood-colored wine inside next to my table setting. Wine! I’d thought the evening would be a somber one, on account of Mrs. Hawk. I dip a finger inside to watch the crimson liquid drop. There must be a mistake. But Yesi looks at me wide-eyed, her own lips purple, clutching her goblet like it’s a talisman. Carmela, too, catches my eye and nods at me, a veritable smile playing on her stained lips. She turns back to speak with Armadello, the dullest man there ever was, looking like a kindly deity in her flesh-colored sweater coat.

  “What’s the occasion?” I whisper to Yesi. “Shouldn’t we be more … subdued?”

  “Shut. Up. She didn’t die. She left,” she whispers back. “Now drink it before I drink yours.”

  “Join us for a cup, Mavi,” Carmela calls over the table without a mention of my tardiness. “In gratitude to Mrs. Hawk.”

  A few of the others clink glasses. Morency, I notice, is conspicuously absent, and her space is empty, so I feel no disapproval emanating from her corner. Dom’s is empty, too. I cradle my cup. The groups around me chat about previous jobs; the girls giggle when Lamb mentions he worked as a butcher’s assistant until he couldn’t stomach the carcass smell any longer. He cannot, to this day, look at blood without fainting dead away. I press away the rare slice of beef on my plate with a tight smile and down my glass of wine in one long gulp, eager for it to rush to my head. Not another word is spoken about Mrs. Hawk, and, oddly, the feeling in the house is one of general merriment. I try to embrace it. After all, I hardly knew the woman, I tell myself.

  “Can you tell us more about the cement company you owned, Carmela?” I ask aloud when there’s a lull in the upbeat conversation. Yesi kicks me under the table. But I may as well take advantage of her good humor.

  A smile erupts across Carmela’s face, her sharp teeth a blinding white. For once, she’s not judging us, tight-lipped. She’s not icing over the atmosphere in the room. I have complimented her in a way she finds appropriate, and as such, we have all been blessed. “Well,” she says, folding and creasing her napkin once, twice, “it was fascinating work, operating at the highest levels of international industry. I was responsible for brokering more than a dozen massive deals before the governmental troubles arose.” I look into my glass of wine as Yesi refills it surreptitiously. Diana whispers, What troubles? Carmela’s smile wrinkles. “But, of course, it didn’t offer the potential for personal satisfaction that Vaccaro School d
oes,” she adds in a tone brittle enough to give me pause, to give everyone pause.

  Mole sniffs audibly. “You should give the girls a business seminar, Madame De Vaccaro.”

  The girls smile and waggle their heads like otters, implicitly understanding when to suck up and to whom. “Yes, Madame De Vaccaro!” says Gisella. “You absolutely must!”

  “We might have a mini Carmela De Vaccaro in this very room,” adds Lamb, clapping together his hands guilelessly. “Empresses of business! Imagine! Now that would be a fearsome sight, a pack of ruthless girls raiding the corporate world! You should teach them, Madame De Vaccaro. What it would be like to have your own child follow you into your business…! Well, not your child, per se, but a child, a child you’ve educated”—his eyes freeze with a vaguely pained look, as Mole’s widen in warning—“that’s a dream I’ve always had, myself, there being a child I might have a hold over—that is to say, with whom I might share my passions … Wouldn’t that be … just…” A gurgling sound like that of an animal in anguish dies in his throat.

  Yesi drops her eyes to her plate as I choke on a sip of wine. The unsubtle mention of Carmela’s dead daughter could never go unnoticed, not with the way gossip travels here. After several seconds of silence, a quiet moan escapes Lamb’s mouth, and he bows his head.

  Carmela smears the neatly folded napkin across her lips, the resultant bloody lipstick stain visible from my seat. “I am an administrator, Mr. Lamm. Not a teacher.”

  The rest of the meal is a solemn affair, even though Carmela bestows one or two more bright and false smiles upon us all. She permits us to shepherd ourselves back to our rooms since Morency is otherwise engaged.

  It’s a short enough walk, but I can’t see straight from the wine. I take a series of wrong turns with Yesi, both of us stumbling and laughing so hard my sides ache.

  “That poor, poor dear,” says Yesi, swinging me around by the hand, spinning me as we tango. “He would make a magnificent villain were his intentions at all baaaaaaaaaaaaaahd.”

  I punch her in the shoulder, hiccupping in tears. “After his butcher story I wasn’t sure I could stomach seeing a Lamb go to the slaughter.” I fall onto a miniature chair with my knees in the hall, its legs or my legs creaking ominously as I sway.

  Yesi, red-faced and nest-haired, takes my cheeks with her thumbs and forefingers. “Oh, my little Holden, my fiercely independent and naive and cynical and affectionate and darling little Holden. If I could keep you from ever living any deaths or abandonments or disappointments, I would.”

  I take her hands and swing her around, laughing. “You’ve lost it, Yesi.”

  We slow, and hand in hand, I sing the lullaby my mother used to sing me growing up: “Que linda manito que tengo yo, que linda y bonita que Dios me dio…”

  “It’s blanquita, not bonita, isn’t it?” Yesi asks, stopping me.

  “My mother changed it,” I explain, the walls spinning around us. “Todas son bonitas, aunque no sean blanquitas.”

  The rest of the stroll blurs; we read the winding walls like braille to return. Seven, seven, thank goodness I’ve found seven, placed the seven in the seven, seven times seven. I drop onto the bed and fall asleep with my filthy Mary Janes still strapped, humming the lullaby to myself, as if it can allay all my latent fears.

  * * *

  It is the dead of night when I wake from a dream of draining the bathtub, full of frothy, rancid water, with my mouth. There’s a motherless one here, whispers a girlish voice from the closet as I splutter. I am covered in sweat, disoriented, and shivering. I curl my feet up only to feel the soles of my shoes rasp against the sheets. There’s a motherless one here. Because of the skylight in the shared bathroom, the moonlight bathes my room in a faint, otherworldly glow. My room door has been opened, a draft blowing through, and the closet door has been, too, exposing the gaping maw of the closet.

  I see a sliver of white, slipping out of the darkness within. Her. A little girl, her long and greasy hair draped in front of her face and hanging over her shoulders like a yoke.

  The intruder, I think. How did she get in? I swear I locked my room door. I swear it.

  I squint my eyes at her in the dark. She’s pale and impossibly reedy; she wears a disintegrating and stained lace nightgown that exposes her skeletal arms and her knobby ankles.

  She is unfamiliar—not one of the little girls I know here.

  She shuts the closet door with a single finger, all while adjusting her neck with the other hand. The sound of each vertebra cracking sends a tremor through me. No, she’s not like the girls I teach. That’s when I stop breathing, hoping I won’t catch her attention. Hoping I can melt into my bed and become invisible. Hoping I can fall into a safer realm of sleep and forget this encounter.

  Yet I continue to watch her, pinching my eyes into slits. Riveted and terrified.

  She moves about my room with the self-possession of someone who does not feel the eyes of others on her, splaying the pages of my books, rifling through a pile of clean and folded clothes. I smell a rank waft, ripe and aged, like the meaty interior of a used plaster cast.

  Could she be a ghost, or the ghost of someone lost to the curse sixty years ago?

  She drops a crumpled shirt of mine and moves toward the chest, placing both hands on its fine wood with delicacy. Her feet are bare, lacy blue with cold or a strange form of rot, and none of her steps make a single sound on the floorboards.

  In fact, as she moves, her feet do not brush the ground at all.

  She lifts a book I’ve left on the chest and lets it slam onto the chest hard, her black eyes darting over to me with cold mischief.

  She sees me startle. It was intentional—a trap. I shut my eyes tight and feel a surge of intense, bone-singing fear. There is only silence in the darkness, except for my heartbeat, which I wish I could stop. Will she touch me? Will she go? Have courage, Mavi. She can’t be older than twelve. She can’t intimidate me.

  I open one eye, still praying she’s gone—only to muffle a shriek and shrink back into my sheets. She’s much closer, so close I can taste her foul breath, and she’s leaning over me like an otherworldly animal. She blinks her two dark eyes at me. There is a twisted hopelessness about her, a flattened affect to her that only exists in children who have cut themselves off from the world after terrible harm.

  Is this creature the tenth girl? The tenth student?

  She may be unfamiliar, but she does resemble someone I know. It’s in the curve of the jaw, in the hairline. But who? She stands, bones still cracking in her spine, amusement playing on her dry lips.

  “English teacher,” she whispers in a charmless singsong. “You’re awake.”

  My throat closes at the label.

  “Won’t you answer me, English teacher?”

  I freeze, only my heart galloping at what feels like hundreds of beats a minute in a useless body. She moves even closer, bringing her stench of putrefaction with her, and kneeling onto the edge of my bed, her black eyes wide. Their corners are red and encrusted, as if she’s ill. My mind, my body warn me not to engage her. I silently beg her not to come closer. I need her farther from me.

  “Or don’t answer,” she says. “I’ve only come to tell you that the Others are coming.”

  Who is coming now? My eyes flash to the open hall door, on instinct.

  “Aren’t you going to ask who the Others are?” she asks in a rough rasp. She simulates patting my head, and I withdraw, swallowing the painful knot of dryness in my throat.

  My reply is barely audible. “The Zapuche?”

  She smacks her dry lips. “No.” She wilts back onto her pin-thin ankles at an unnatural angle that should snap them. “The Others,” she says with emphasis, taking her own long and filthy hair in her fingers. “The Zapuche opened a path for them with their curse. They come from all corners of the globe. It’s already starting. I know you’ve felt them.” She plays with her ropes of inky hair, twirling them roughly. “They’re always watching, always
waiting. But they visit most at night. Passing drafts and whispers—that’s them. You understand?” A few long strands come loose in her hand. “They’re taking over this house again. And now that they’ve made one little girl sick, the rest will follow,” she says, letting the hairs drop onto my bed. “No one should have ever come back here.”

  They’ve made one little girl sick. Sara. A common cold, Mole said. Coughing, fatigue, nothing more. I pinch my leg to see if I’m awake—it stings precisely as it should.

  “I don’t understand,” I mumble.

  “Speak up,” she replies.

  “Sara has a cold.”

  She takes the ends of her gnarled hair in hand and picks through them. “It looks like a cold, like a virus, but it isn’t. The virus is a lie crafted by the De Vaccaro family. Do you understand me yet? The Others like to cause trouble.”

  The virus is a lie? “What are the Others?”

  “They’re not like you.” She breaks off a knot of hair. “But they want to be like you. They want to live, to breathe, to laugh, to eat. But they cannot so easily. They need energy, and they cannot get it as you do. They borrow it from you instead. A little at a time, a little more, a little more, until you can’t lift yourself from bed.” She tilts her chin toward me. “Get it?”

  I shake my head.

  Her lip twitches, and her hands drop her hair. “Well, in any case, you’ll see soon enough.”

  She settles her bony hands on her knees and takes a breath, as if fortifying herself. “I am going to encourage you to leave, now,” she says, enunciating carefully. “I’m going to encourage you to leave and take everyone else with you. I know you’re not likely to listen until it’s too late, but I am telling you that leaving is the courageous and intelligent choice in this scenario, no matter what you may think.”

  I process her suggestion. To leave? To leave now, when we’ve only just arrived? When each of us has given pieces of ourselves to this place? We’ve come here and done our damnedest to settle down. We must make the best of what we’ve been granted.