by Sara Faring
A jumble of outrage and fear unlocks a new courage in me, and I sit up in bed and try to turn on my lamp. To face this odd creature in the light. I keep eye contact with her as I fumble for the switch, failing to find it in its normal spot. She stares at me, rubbing her hands together, as if keeping warm, and I realize it: Her face resembles a face I’ve gazed at for many afternoons. She looks like Dom.
Could this be Carmela’s lost daughter? I stop searching for the switch, shivering in the dark.
“Who are you exactly?” I whisper.
She slips off the bed, uneasy, as if noticing the recognition in my tone. “I don’t matter. I’m a memory. This warning is all I’m good for.”
“Then—then how do you know all of this?”
“I know the residents of this rock better than you,” she says, turning from me and gathering the hem of her nightgown in one swooping motion. Stepping toward my open door.
“Wait!” I call. “Where can I find you?”
“You can’t,” she says before rushing toward the hall and disappearing through the doorway.
I push to my feet and follow her, peering into the empty hall, and even drifting down its unlit length.
“What happened to Mrs. Hawk?” I call out into the dark.
No one answers.
As my mind sharpens, I notice that my arms and legs shake so badly I cannot keep myself upright. This was all a waking nightmare, I tell myself. A nightmare brought about by drunkenness.
But she looked so real. The tenth girl, if that’s what I should call her. I want to trust in what she told me, and that terrifies me more than her visit itself. Her message stirred intense feelings of horror and relief in me, as if my body and mind know their appalling intuitions about this house have been confirmed.
I’m a few steps into the pitch-blackness—the moon, so temperamental, has disappeared again—when I feel a presence close.
“Is that you?” I ask, pushing my hands into the darkness.
“Miss Quercia,” comes a deep voice. I jump—I can barely discern the speaker’s shape, but it’s massive, rangy.
When I see a loose bun, unraveled into a long braid, my blood runs colder than ever.
“What are you doing out of your room at this hour?” Morency asks. The whites of her eyes luminesce. “It isn’t right. It isn’t right for you to be out like this. And to be shouting about Mrs. Hawk, after—” Silence swallows her words.
I cross my arms to stop their tremors. “There was a girl, Ms. Morency. A little girl. She didn’t seem well. She came to my room and—”
“Enough. No little girls roam this hall. Enough of your stories.” She wraps the black cloth around her shoulders; the bones stick out like handles. “Stay in your room at night.”
I fall back toward my room, shaking still, and she waits, a motionless giant in the dark, until my fingers connect with my doorknob.
I close the door behind me, triple-checking the lock, and nestle back into bed, but it’s difficult to fall asleep, even buried under the layered blankets and breathing into the safe pocket of stale air. Too much adrenaline floods my veins.
I will admit it: Despite my stated lack of belief in the paranormal, I prayed for a midnight message of guidance after my mother was taken—after she died, if I’m to believe what my godmother told me. I remember what Dom asked me once: Wouldn’t you want to see your mother again? In truth, I did keep a boxed-up hope in the back closet of my mind that my mother might visit me in some form, strong in spirit as she was. Surely she could figure out a way to speak to me one last time. To tell me she was in peace, or to tell me to perform some duty for her. To urge me forward, following in her footsteps. But, of course, she never came. No one did.
Yet here, at Vaccaro School, two mysterious presences have crossed my path already, unbidden:
Michelle, who resembles the dead for reasons I cannot comprehend.
And this strange girl, this supernatural intruder. They’re always watching, always waiting. But they visit most at night.
Are her intentions entirely good? Or could she be one of these devious creatures she warned me about?
Surely there could be no nefarious reason to warn someone about danger.
On impulse, I rise and open the closet door in the corner, as if to expose her hiding place. But the closet is still empty, even if it feels as quietly carnivorous as before.
Vaccaro School has tightened its hold on me, and now it tests my pressure points. Tests my perceptions, my strength, my belief in the impossible. I’ve been asked to give pieces of myself, and now I’ve been asked to leave. What horrors are to follow her warning? This question perks up the hair on my arms like each one is a ghostly stinger left behind by an old pricking.
I play my pitifully limited reel of memories in my head to calm down: my mother at the piano before she left, playing old songs Papa must have loved with a dreamy look on her face. Smiling sadly when she notices me. Eating medialunas each morning together, flakes dotting the kitchen table. Her hands holding up the newspaper. The scratch of the pencil tip. Circling. Underlining. Mavi? Those birds that merrily gathered near our windows in the mornings when summer turns muggy, preening and cooing. It is mental exercise, to try to recall them with such clarity, with such detail. These good memories I take for granted are threads that bind me together. Snip one and I might unravel.
After spending a while gathering them, tending to them, bright colors flood my brain, and I drop off into a shallow, troubled sleep.
* * *
After washing up the next morning, I groggily find a loose clump of dark hair at the foot of my bed, and I stare at it for a good minute before tucking it into my coat pocket with an unsteady hand. The girl was real—her warning real, too. As far-fetched as it might seem.
I hurry down to breakfast, pouring myself two mugs of coffee, holding the milk, glugging the coffee down, and refilling them both. Ignoring the odd looks, I struggle to open the patio door without free hands—an awkward endeavor involving elbows and ring fingers—before Mole takes pity on me and outstretches her hands to take my coffee mugs with a knowing look. It’s too wintry for the others on the patio, at six biting degrees Celsius, more or less, and it’s decidedly gray and ominous. But I still draw the door back with a creak, and frigid air blasts in. Restorative, in my mind, but Mole recoils, handing both cups back as I step out onto the frosted stone. “If you have to vomit,” she says quietly, tugging the doors closed behind me, “do so over the balcony.” Behind the window, she winks and mimes my knocking on the door when I wish to be let back inside with the rest of the sane people.
I wish Yesi was around so that I might explain what happened—I associate her with rationality, but I haven’t lost my impression of her interest in the macabre and otherworldly. If anyone can reconcile me with last night’s nightmare, it will be her. She isn’t at breakfast, though, and this morning, both entry points to her room were locked. It took all my composure not to break into full-handed smacks of the bathroom door to wake her hungover self up. What if she was also visited?
I take in the brisk air as deeply as I do the caffeinated mud-water, with a mind to those old-fashioned mountain health retreats, and I will myself to find reassurance in the thick, protective clouds and the ice. But it’s impossible: The glacial field approaches the house with the gall of a silent rogue army, as if it might accost us up here someday.
We are all trapped on this rock; the house itself is an ancient gilded cage. Who exactly watches us from the sky, from the ice, as we putter about, as we go along our trivial lives cluelessly inside? My visitor was only the first to show herself, and the Others won’t share her benevolent intentions, if I am to believe her. I drain the second coffee cup—the dregs now room temperature after a minute outside—and Dom appears in the corner of my eye by the patio window, speaking to someone out of sight inside the breakfast room. His smile makes him look boyish when it’s genuine. I frown without thinking, reminded of the girl’s resemblance to him.
And for some reason, I never expected him to have friendly relations with other people in the house, either. I thought his friendship was private and reserved for me alone, as absurd as that sounds. He notices me watching him and raises a hand. I fall back from the window and look off into the ice in what must seem like embarrassed shock. I ignore the flutter in my chest as my thoughts return to the girl from last night—my mind parses through every available image in hopes of deciphering whether she was fantasy or reality. Alternating icy breaths and scalding coffee should have ushered me back into reality, but all it does is punish my throat for my being unreasonable.
* * *
I bump into Yesi at last in the snaking ground-floor hallway on the way to class. She’s carrying an open box of chocolates in her hand.
“Thank God,” I say, seizing her shoulders. “You slept in?”
She shakes her head. “God has nothing to do with it,” she says, grinning, and extends the box toward me. “Want? I spent some time on the book in the sitting room. I’d been neglecting it.” I ignore the chocolates, and her face darkens as she shuts the box. “Swamp?”
I take her free wrist—thin as a twig—and drag her in the direction of the front door.
“Jesus, Swampy,” she says, falling behind me. “Slow down.”
“Something happened to me last night.” I drop her hand as we climb down the front steps, through a fog so thick we cannot see more than a meter before us. We pass a swinging arm, which ends up being attached to Mole herself, who waves at us, the odd couple, before we dart past into the fog once more. “I’ve been wanting to tell you about it all morning.”
“Something happened? Vague. Terribly vague.” She tucks the chocolate box under her arm with a wary glance at the cobblestones, but she keeps up with my pace as we pass what must be the science cottage, engulfed in murk. “Can’t you tell me inside, where it’s warm? I don’t have my coat, and I wasn’t built for single-digit temperatures—”
“Either I’ve vivid dreams,” I say, slowing to a stop before the English cottage, its telltale awning riding atop the mist, and pushing inside with a grating rasp, “or I was visited by a ghost.”
She narrows her eyes, opens the chocolate box, pops a square into her mouth, and chews the bite thoroughly, thinking. “Mmm. Caramel.”
“That’s all you have to say?” I ask, my breaths turning shallow. The classroom is still frosty, its windows entirely whited out, and I need to click on the space heater and find a coat, but my mind’s running too quickly to prioritize. “A little girl came to me in my room. A little girl who looked so much like Dom. Look—” I rustle inside my pocket and pull out the clump of hair, showing it to Yesi. She wrinkles her nose in disgust, and I let the hair drop. In the light of day, it looks a lot like my own. “She warned me that creatures are coming for the girls,” I tell her. “The Others, she called them. Will afflict them with something that looks like a virus but isn’t. The supposed virus Sara has right now.”
“Awfully specific for a ghost,” she says, biting into another neat square.
“She knew the De Vaccaros. She could be Carmela’s dead daughter. Don’t you think?”
She swallows. “Well, Swampy,” she says, closing the box once more with studied nonchalance, “maybe she was the ghost of Carmela’s girl. Though I’m sure she wouldn’t survive any visits outside their palatial family wing.” She smirks. “Survive was a naughty choice of word.”
“I’m being serious, Yesi,” I say, frowning. I’m surprised, to be honest, by her blasé reaction, even if I am being ridiculous. You’d think a writer could manufacture a more imaginative and encouraging reply. “I am telling you this little girl was a real ghost, whether or not she’s a De Vaccaro. And she was instructing us to leave.”
“A real ghost. Well. I’m glad she was a real one.” She turns from me to switch on the space heater. “With real shedding problems, apparently.”
I ignore her. “Do you think the Zapuche curse is real?” I ask her in a whisper, unable to drop the subject. “And if it is, do you think we could find one of them, nearby, and have them … reverse it? Then we wouldn’t have to leave.”
Yesi turns to look at me with a startling mix of pity and surprise in her clear blue eyes. “Just to be safe,” I add uselessly, the words leaving a metallic tang in my mouth.
“There are no more Zapuche here,” she says carefully. “By the midfifties, the entire local tribe was run out of the area by government-backed loggers. You must know that. For all we know, they’ve been exterminated.”
I feel as if a heavy stone has landed upon my chest. “Exterminated?” I say in that same whisper, because it is all I can manage.
“Now, listen, Swamp. You said you might have experienced an especially stimulating dream. The house is spooky. I’ll give your little ghost girl that. But I don’t think there’s any more to it than that. After all, aren’t all old places a bit scary? The idea of the history here alone.” An abominable history. I drop into the nearest wooden chair. She places two hands on my shoulders and squeezes. “The booze did you no favors, Swamp darling. And Mrs. Hawk’s departure clearly rattled you. I don’t blame you or the little ghost girl in that wonderful head of yours.”
She’s condescending to me. I bat her fingers away and drop my head into my hands so she won’t see the disappointment there. I’ve never before questioned my sanity in a serious fashion, and last night’s shared bottle of wine couldn’t have muddled my mind as much as Yesi suggests. I take a deep, cleansing breath.
Suppose Yesi is right. The altitude doesn’t help, nor does the isolation … My old paranoia might have manifested itself in this nightmare of a girl.
“Fine. I need to relax.” I will relax, I think to myself, as my heart only beats harder.
She smiles with closed lips.
“So how’s the book?” I ask as my mind swirls with all the unknown evil of this world, lurking out of sight. “Speaking of ghosts. Real or unreal.”
Her eyes are already distant. “Like a living, breathing thing. Like a greedy, suckling child.”
I spot her box of chocolates, sitting on a desk and encased in shiny, fancy gold wrapping paper that I only just noticed. “At least you don’t have to feed it.”
She laughs, warming her hands before the space heater. “Oh, Swampy. It’s twice as hungry as the average infant. If I don’t feed it pieces of myself daily, it turns into an absolute monster of a thing.”
* * *
In class, I ask the girls to read their compositions aloud to the others, which sounds like a sly way of convincing them I’m an attentive teacher when in truth I’m unable to focus whatsoever. I appraise them all from my seat at the table, as if I might see traces of a disguise one of them used to prank me last night. Michelle catches me watching her and stumbles over a few words, but the others manage their presentations quite well. I hold her back after class and consciously try to prevent my hands from convulsing, my eyes from twitching on account of my unwise caffeine consumption earlier.
“How are you doing?” I ask, smothering my hands in my pockets. “Sleeping well?”
“I’m a bit tired,” she says, blushing. “But I’m fine. Why? What is it?”
“So you and the other girls are doing well?” I look away as casually as possible. “Even with Mrs. Hawk gone?”
And she hesitates, slipping her book bag onto her shoulder. “I guess so. We didn’t know her well. She suffered from bad migraines and missed class a lot.”
“And Sara? Have you seen her today?” Carmela has limited her visitors, claiming that it’s too much activity for her. To her credit, Carmela has been tending to Sara herself—the one sign of motherly devotion and care I’ve seen in her.
“Oh. Well, Madame De Vaccaro did let me see her this morning,” says Michelle, smoothing down the limp hair beside her part. “She’s doing so much better—bursting with energy. You wouldn’t believe it.”
* * *
Yesi leaves me for the book after our class
es, again, with an apologetic and pitying pat, and Mr. Lamm has taken over the sitting room as his private pipe-smoking den, making it impossible to penetrate without hacking up a lung, so I wander the house for a while until I’m due to meet Dom.
I comb the serpentine hall for a doorway I haven’t seen, a nook I haven’t explored, but despite my best efforts, the house loops me around and back around to the same set of tired rooms. So I peek into those musty but familiar sitting rooms, searching for fresh evidence that something is amiss.
I encounter no one but Gisella, curled up with a book and very much alone. She registers my intrusion a second late and, with none of her characteristic nonchalant grace, struggles to conceal the cover with splayed hands.
“What are you reading?” I ask, unable to resist and expecting something forbidden.
She bites her lip and shows me: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, in English, nonetheless.
“Don’t tell the others,” she says as I’m about to compliment her taste. “They keep asking me to paint their nails because I’m the best at it.” She frowns haughtily. “But I don’t run a stupid salon.”
And the Gisella I know is back. I suppress a smile. “Do you like it?” I ask, pointing at the book.
She nods, silent. Her fingers crawl across the cover, as if itching to reopen it.
“I’ll look for more for you,” I tell her, smiling and shutting the door on her private escape.
Every other sitting room remains untouched—most are woefully ignored by the current occupants of the house. The last people to enjoy them are surely long dead; the air has never felt as stale, choked full of dust composed of shed skin cells.
What am I searching for?
The girl, holed up somewhere, filling a familiar space with that strange stench of hers?
Mrs. Hawk, whose disappearance maddens me still? A part of me doesn’t believe the woman could have left of her own volition.
