The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “So she’s one of the girls from Zapuche legend? The girls who were sacrificed to protect them from Others?”

  He scoffs. “Protect. Yeah, sure.” He narrows his eyes. “Been reading house history books in your free time, huh?” He purses his slicked lips, appraising me. “I just don’t get you, kid.”

  “What’s the girl’s deal? The one who’s in the house now?”

  “What’s her deal? How am I supposed to know, you inarticulate moron? I’m not her keeper. I’ve never even seen her. But if the little mongrel’s still scrounging out an existence, I bet she hates our guts. She strikes me as the uppity type. With morals. You know what I’m talking about.”

  He snaps his fingers, conjuring a book from the thick air, and resumes reading. I squint at him, trying to gauge whether he’s being an honest or dishonest asshole, but he doesn’t even acknowledge me. Further attempts at asking him for information only lead to his politely requesting I bugger off to a moist and foul-smelling five-foot-long place I’d rather not mention (my own colon).

  But now I know she exists, and purpose is a set of wings, strapped to the unexceptional so they can fly.

  I’ll find her, Mama.

  13

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, MAY 1978

  Despite my newfound belief in Vaccaro School ghosts, a couple of nights pass in relative calm, without a single abnormal sighting—I sleep in healthy patches, tossing around my blankets, awakening in the oddest dreams. Every one features me and Dom together on an unnamed beach, a dark city street, or a leafy suburban park—surrounded by throngs of strangers, our skin glistening from an unusual humidity. I cannot hear our conversation, because I am distracted by the overwhelming feeling of being watched by hundreds of curious, shaded eyes. When I peer more closely at the strangers around us, their features blur until they vanish. The vaguest promise of doom hangs in the air, but nothing ever comes of it.

  I never experience dreams set in what could be a hypothetical future, and these fill me with a lingering apprehension. How am I meant to interpret them? Should I bother at all with a pursuit as silly as dream interpretation?

  I am unnerved by a change at school, however, and it’s nothing I could have foreseen in my dreams: One morning, the gray redoubles with a vengeance, so thick that it eats away the toe of our every footstep. Each teacher is made to pick up the girls at her previous class and escort them through the nasty brume to her own. After mine, the last before lunch, Morency herself comes. But Michelle must peel off, because she approaches me while I’m grading a few essays.

  “Miss Quercia?” she whispers, squeezing the paunch of her teddy bear–like book bag. I expect her to apologize for her recent class-time naps. Only yesterday, I turned my back to the girls for a moment and found that they had propped little folded paper animals all over Michelle’s sleeping form, as if they’d taken to living on their heedless host. When I tapped Michelle on the shoulder, she startled and smiled up at me dreamily, the animals remaining in place.

  “I wanted to…” She stops and grinds her nails into the bag’s leather, shaking her head. Her lower lids tremble, and in that moment, I notice the distinctly blue tinge to the delicately veined skin beneath them. “You asked how I was the other day. Why?”

  I hesitate and set down my pen.

  “Do you sleep well here?” she adds, propping the bag on my desk.

  “I suppose that depends.”

  “Have you noticed anything at night?” She flattens her palms on the wood grain of the desk. Her nail beds turn white. “Have you felt anything at night?”

  I will my facial muscles to remain immobile. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. Homesickness?” I remember her awful aunt, who locked her away and served her canned foods. “Altitude sickness?” To hold on to my sanity here is to grasp at straws.

  Rubbing at her pale moon face until her cheeks turn pink, she sighs and looks at the floor. “I sometimes think someone is in my room at night, is all.”

  “What?” My breath feels trapped inside my rib cage. “Someone who isn’t your roommate?”

  Her chin drops to her chest in ashamed assent, and a phantom fist clenches around my guts.

  “Who?” I want to take her by the shoulders. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.” She scrubs at her cheeks again as if warming them. “I thought, at first, it was another girl. But she didn’t laugh; she didn’t make noise. She only watched. So now I think it’s someone else. Someone just watching.”

  “Watching you?” I ask, thinking of my own visitor. “Has Diana said anything?”

  Diana, her roommate, should know if anything out of the ordinary was happening, but Diana has not been the most forthcoming student with me, spending most of her time coloring in her rainbow of notebooks and ignoring questions, speaking, instead, only out of turn. But Michelle shakes her head. “I wanted to know if you felt the same thing, and that’s why you asked.”

  “Michelle, don’t you think we should discuss this with someone else … like Madame De Vaccaro?” The thought is a terrible one, of course. I can’t imagine Carmela De Vaccaro quelling anyone’s fears or anxieties, though she did manage Sara’s sickness well, if Sara is truly recovering. “Perhaps you caught what Sara has? We should talk to Madame De Vaccaro.”

  Her hands squirrel into her blazer pockets and ball into hard lumps as a violent color stains her abused cheeks. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen,” she says in an unfamiliar, strangled pitch. “That’s why I came to you.”

  “All right, then,” I say, plucking one hand from her pocket and smoothing it out. “We won’t for now, okay?” She tenses up as I say for now. It must be hypocritical of me to refuse to trust Carmela for a moment yet refer Michelle to her for her own troubles. “You can trust me.”

  “But you don’t believe me.”

  That isn’t true—I’m not prepared to admit to a child what I believe. “Of course I believe you. But I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for your feeling uncomfortable and not getting any sleep,” I lie. “Perhaps you’re having nightmares? Nightmares you forget when you wake?”

  Her hand feels gelid and limp in my grip. “When you have nightmares,” she says, slowing her words down, as if patiently explaining a phenomenon to a younger child, “they feel real, and they take you to another place, but when you wake, you are brought back to where you are, and you know the nightmare was not real.”

  “Yes,” I say, wary of where she’s headed. “I think that’s true.”

  She stares at me, unblinking. “This isn’t like that. This is nothing like that,” she says with the dark authority and clarity of a doctor providing a patient with his unfortunate clinical diagnosis.

  Chills run up my arms. “But you’re sure someone’s there?”

  “Yes. But I can’t see them.”

  Suffice it to say my blood runs cold. This is surely no dreamlike visit from an amicable ghost. These are the wily ghosts I’ve been told to fear. I don’t know what to say, what to do, and a sour taste blooms from the root of my tongue.

  “I will look into this myself,” I promise. “And in the meantime, we’ll find you some chamomile tea so you can get some proper rest tonight.”

  From her flat smile, I can’t tell whether she’s satisfied or horribly disappointed. I escort her back up to the house to wash up—our pace three times as slow as usual, for we must count each of the hundred and fifty steps now.

  As I lunch alone, I single out the fears in my mind: What if spirits are, indeed, hurting the girls? Spirits I can’t control, much less understand? What if I can do nothing at all to help, once I do learn more about them?

  I do my best to box up these fears, seal them shut, push them to the edge of my thoughts. Because despite these stacks of worry crowding my brain, I still know the right thing to do. I will listen to Michelle. I won’t write off her behavior as evidence of insanity or hysteria or homesickness because it’s convenient or the logical thing.

  Because I beli
eve her.

  * * *

  I look for Yesi after lunch, finding Diana, instead, sprawled on her stomach in a sea of colored pencils in the deserted ballroom, a pad of paper in hand. Peering over her shoulder, I see she’s sketching the bizarre mural of the demon and the farm girl in extreme, gory detail.

  “Good work,” I whisper, and she flips over with a focused look on her face.

  “I’m redoing it,” she says. “So that it’s more realistic.”

  “Oh?”

  “The girl wouldn’t just sit there like an idiot.” She points to the glaring peasant girl on her page, wielding something sharp in hand. “She would notice the demon, even if he’s invisible, and she would stab him in the neck.”

  “I see.” I fold my hands, not knowing whether to admire or fear this pastime of hers. I clear my throat. “Diana, I take it you—you haven’t seen anything like the demon in your room at night?” Lord, the euphemisms I must use.

  Her cheeks turn bloodred, matching my own embarrassment, and she shakes her mop of hair before flipping back onto her stomach and burrowing into her sheet.

  “Well, carry on,” I encourage briskly before leaving her to what I have decided is important work: revamping the most tasteless parts of this dated house.

  * * *

  I find Yesi at last, toiling away on her book in a grungy sitting room, and I decide to present her with my latest flimsy scraps of evidence, in the form of what Dom and Michelle have told me. She as good as laughs at me, and when I rise to leave, faint footsteps trail after me into the hall. “Oh, Swampy,” Yesi says, precious book tucked under one arm, as she grapples for my wrist with her free hand. “Nothing to worry about. Don’t worry. Truly.” When I stop, she neatens my hair, like a girl’s, and I wave her aside.

  I march on, passing a painting of a shadowy and unwelcoming landscape that rests askew on the wall. “I don’t understand. You’re fascinated by the macabre history of the house, drawn in by all the gloom, but you brush off what I told you as silly? What about what Michelle’s going through? That doesn’t alarm you in the slightest?”

  “Oh, Swamp Thing…!” She cuts off a laugh, bounding after me. “She’s a child. You shouldn’t become one, too. If it’s anything more than a story, it’s sleep paralysis. I’ve heard of children having frightening episodes—you know, finding themselves unable to speak or move for a couple of moments before and after sleep. Feeling inexplicable doom and all that. Frightful thing.”

  I’m unconvinced, but I slow. Yesi’s behaved strangely ever since I told her about my visitor. She’s ignored me, patronized me. But why? I glance back at her, clutching her precious book, and an explanation hits me like a frozen shard up the spine. “Ah,” I say. “I see it now. You resent that a wild and mystical creature visited me and not you, patron goddess of all things ghostly.”

  Yesi’s look is razor-edged. “I am not jealous of your nightmares. I don’t play the role of the vulnerable, susceptible young maiden, myself. Though it’s quite clear that there are those in this house who adore it on you. Mavi, the fragile lady plagued by haunting messages from the other side. Just the thing to inflame a twenty-five-year-old male’s overactive libido, especially one who reads Tropic of Cancer, which would have been brushed off as a breezy sex memoir had it been written by a woman.”

  I feel rooted to the ground, feet tingling. “Excuse me?”

  She crosses her arms over her book. “Don’t patronize me, now.”

  “Dom’s not like that,” I say, crossing my arms back at her. “He understands that I don’t confuse fantasy and reality. He treats me like an adult.”

  She snorts with laughter. “He’s not like that. How can you keep spouting that drivel? Listen to yourself.” She points a tiny finger at me. “Don’t get yourself into trouble with that addict. He will take advantage of you. And, Swampy dear, if he’s put ideas into your head, I’ll murder him myself.” Her eyes are glassy, reflecting the antique-yellow light from the tarnished hall sconces. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she adds, voice wavering. “Not even in a house with a bloody past.”

  I watch her, stunned into silence. Only one coherent question comes to mind. “Then why are you writing a ghost story?”

  A part of me, the vindictive part, hopes to stump her. I hope to force her to sputter out a transparent lie or immediately confess some odd vulnerability. But instead, she places one hand on her hip, still clutching the book firmly with the other arm, her expression hardening. “I write my ghost story to exorcise myself of a fear of the unknown,” she says, as if it is obvious, before turning around, powering toward the staff stairs, and climbing them two at a time.

  “What?” I rush after her. “The unknown?”

  “The great unknown,” she says over her shoulder. “Why are we born the way we are, at this time, in this place? It overwhelms me, this feeling of randomness.”

  “And how do ghosts remedy that?”

  “Ghosts are an invention of people looking to reconcile themselves with the peculiarity of memory, with the randomness—and permanence—of loss, with unfathomable inner selves,” she says. “Ghosts are one of the first and best metaphors!” I can’t tell if she’s pivoting or exposing some tender inner truth in grandiose terms. I’m learning there is a hardened core beneath the layers of whimsical dreaminess, of game nonchalance. She slows until I’ve caught up to her. One step above me, she rests a hand on my shoulder. “Change has been hard on all of us, Swampy. Chin up. I believe you saw a little girl—consciously or subconsciously—who warned you about this place. I’m not saying you are silly. The house is a mystery to everyone—it brings out so much in each of us.” Her hand drops from my shoulder, and she scoops up mine. “I care about you, Swamp. I worry about you. Don’t become unwound, be it over a man-child or a bad night. I don’t want you to waste any more afternoons falling prey to any kind of evil spell. Will you promise me that?”

  My cheeks burn: She’s chiding me for my afternoon encounters with Dom—the ones I thought I had kept so secret. I nod to appease her. If it will take time away from him to restore my friendship with Yesi, so be it. “And to think that, at first, I thought you were one of those wilting Victorian flowers who scribble in diaries all day and believe in the paranormal more than the normal,” I say.

  An unconvincing smile stretches across her face. “Well, you’ve just described an unfortunate stereotype of female writers, Swampy. Good on you.” She leaves me, continuing down the hall.

  If only she believed I was more than the unfortunate stereotype of lovesick maiden.

  * * *

  I wend my way back to the empty kitchen for an apple and a cup of mint tea. The leaves tinge the water a grassy green, a relaxing enough sight, though my hands tremble as I hold the cup.

  A gray-cheeked cleaning woman enters. She ignores my greeting and scrubs a dish with a frown by the solitary window facing the ice.

  Mole told me the staff sleep in a different building; they limit their time inside this house as much as possible. They sense the sinister inside its walls.

  She sets the dish to dry on a rack as I look over her shoulder: Blackened water runs from a colossal new crack that has shot through the ice since morning. How is it that we can even glimpse it? A rare window opens in the fog, enabling us to witness this ominous change. I am overcome by a crawling sense of dread.

  “Devil’s floodgate,” she mutters as she leaves the sink and drifts toward the door.

  “Sorry?” I call after her. “What do you mean?”

  But she is gone.

  That night, I dream that Dom and I are trapped in an unfamiliar sitting room in the house, windowless and decrepit. He speaks to me with palpable desperation, but I cannot understand him. As I read his lips, a tiny hand, small as a tarantula, wriggles onto my shoulder, then another. More and more of them crawl onto me—shrunken, sticky, strong versions of Yesi’s—and I am tugged away from him, back into the damp dark.

  14

  ANGEL: 2020–140
0

  The next time I nudge a history book out of Dom’s shelves, it feels like waterlogged roadkill and smells even worse. It serves me right for thinking I’m some kind of Zapuche academic. I drop it onto the floor and rinse Dom’s hands, wondering if it’s the weed or reality. But when I pull more books off the shelves, all of them are blackening and decaying, as if their pages are made of flayed human skin. The contents of so many erased by moldy speckles. I wonder if the devouring fog has bibliocidal tendencies. Or maybe Book Black Death exists. I flatten out the pages I ripped from the 1925 Zapuche history book in Carmela’s office, already flimsy and wet in Dom’s hand.

  “‘In 1918,’” I read aloud, out of creepy habit, “‘Zapuche staff members assisting the De Vaccaro family at the Vaccaro School wrote letters to their displaced families sharing news about a “sickness” afflicting residents of the house. It was posited that a girl had not been sacrificed in some time to los Otros, and the spirits would naturally become hostile once more. After many of the residents of the house perished—and failed at various attempts to flee—it is said that a couple of remaining Zapuche on the staff were persuaded to sacrifice their own daughters for the “greater good.” The outcome of this grisly endeavor is unclear: It is said that the procedure could not have been entirely effective, since they lacked full tribal knowledge of the ritual. However, a limited number of residents did escape the land and survive.

  “‘No further information is known about the final girl sacrificed.’”

  As if I couldn’t dislike the De Vaccaros more, I now know who deserves credit for their survival. Who was sacrificed? Could she be the little girl who warned Mavi to leave this place?

  “If you can hear me,” I say aloud to the empty, swirling air, “then I’m sorry.”

  Dom’s heart feels heavy as lead in my chest, knowing I’ll only discover answers to these questions inside the demented heads of some of the current residents.