The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  I think of what we carved on Mama’s gravestone: Wonder, until the very end.

  Charon warned me not to consort with the other side: He told me it was time frittered away. But I’ve treasured every precious moment, and my only wish now is to strip away more of the artifice, to see those threads of kinship laid bare between us and to know if they’ll hold.

  So I took her outside, and I told her.

  You’re Mavi, I said, taking her hand. I’m Angel.

  23

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  I sprint from the breakfast room, down the stone hall, and up to the servants’ quarters, dodging the broken steps in a breathless blur. He’s not Domenico. He’s not Domenico at all. The journey has never taken me less time, and I do not pass a single soul. Mind whirling, I burst into my room and rush into the bathroom, pounding on Yesi’s door.

  “Yesi!”

  No one answers. She must still be sleeping. Sleeping or seething. Mistrusting us all. I know she resents me for failing to visit Carmela with her outright—for ruining her credibility by mentioning Dom in our meeting. Lord. Dom.

  I don’t know Domenico—I never did. Not beyond those early days of offhand cruelty, at least. Key still shaking in hand, I wrench my bag from underneath my bed, thrusting odd clumps of clothing inside, then packing every other pitiful item I brought (the hand cream and the toothbrush). It takes less than a minute to collect my Vaccaro School life. I toss my key onto the bed and skid out the door of room 7, flying down the mangled stairs, two at a time, nearly breaking my ankle on a missing step this go-around, zigzagging through the damask hall, its busy cloud pattern concealing patches of frilly dark mold. Damask, brocade, damn it all to hell. The house and its rules mean nothing.

  I should have known. I should have known I wasn’t befriending a reformed Domenico De Vaccaro. His incomprehensible vocabulary, strange accent, and utter lack of knowledge about Argentine politics were no upper-class quirk at all—more so a reflection of growing up elsewhere, in another time. That first shakiness in his bones could never be explained by withdrawal—the idea of taking over a body, mad as it is, fits so much better.

  I should have known.

  If such a spirit can exist and walk among us for weeks unnoticed, which of the rules governing our sad human existence still holds?

  If I can fall for an impostor, can I trust myself again?

  I plow into the locked front door, and as I fiddle with the series of locks above—since when have there been so many damned locks?—I feel the scratch of long nails against my sodden clothes. I flinch, falling into the thick wood of the door as a hand closes around my arm.

  “Where, exactly, do you think you’re going in this storm?”

  Morency in the vestibule. Miserable, sullen Morency, whose beady eyes penetrate the walls with ease, as they do my own soul.

  “I’m leaving.” I hike the bag farther up my shoulder, aware, momentarily, of how violently I am trembling beneath her enormous palm. I tug away, but she keeps a firm grasp on me, her fingers as immovable as iron clamps.

  “You left your room last night.” She leans in so I can see the wetness of her rancid-smelling mouth. Who cares? I want to shout. I close my eyes and fight her grip, expecting her to hurl a string of insults at me, to spit on me, to—

  “What happened?” she asks.

  I stop, my fingers uncurling from the meat of my bag strap, and I open my eyes. She releases her hold, and the fact she isn’t castigating me right now shocks me into brief clarity. “You were right,” I croak.

  “Go on.”

  But how to begin to explain just how unsafe this house is? How to prove that the dangers here are far greater than us, too powerful in their own right for us to understand alone? How can I convince this stubborn woman that we should all be leaving, every one of us? This is a ruined place, I want to shout. There are unknowable strangers here who want to harm us. You must know this. You must sense them. But my chest still heaves too intensely, my mind spins too wildly for me to say any of this.

  “You were on the patio with Master Domenico,” she says when I do not say a word. She crosses her arms, mouth puckered as if sucking a sour candy. “Can you assure me your exchange with him had nothing to do with your decision to leave?”

  I swallow. Of course I can’t. It has everything to do with my decision to leave. “He’s—he’s been possessed.”

  She glowers at me: The truth was the wrong answer. “Am I to take it that your deep concern for the girls of this house was all an elaborate lie to enable you to traipse around and debase yourself with Master Domenico? And now that your romance has died in its wicked bed, now that he has moved on from you, you decide that he has—what?—become possessed by an unfeeling … other?”

  Weak light from the sconces flashes off the whites of her eyes.

  “Excuse me?”

  Morency, the one-track record, bound to repeat her exhausting, unoriginal, moralistic speech no matter what I say. And yet—I can’t keep myself from trying, from screaming into the wind.

  “There are ghosts here, Ms. Morency. And members of this house aren’t in their right minds on account of the dark magic flooding this place. They’re being possessed, taken over, whatever you want to call it. And I learned from—Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving. I won’t meddle any longer. I won’t risk losing my mind, too.” I smear at the streaks beneath my eyes with my free hand, repulsed by the plastic feel of my skin.

  I look up at her, her eyes black in the shadows once more, and I swear, for the briefest of moments, I glimpse a softness there—I cannot know if it is pity or fear.

  “I cannot stop you,” she says in no more than a hoarse whisper. “But the funicular is not running.”

  Of course it isn’t. It’s some punishment she’s devised, I’m sure, for sneaking out last night, for fraternizing with the devil, for confirming her worst instincts about me. What a demon she is. I’m boiling mad; energy crawls down my arms and legs. “I’ll walk.”

  “And the supply boat has been delayed.”

  “I’ll wait for it on the dock anyway,” I snap, turning from her and wrenching the door open at last. Outside, rain falls in sheets on the steps, and the fog is as thick as milk. I stagger back before pushing myself into the dense damp and dragging the door closed behind me.

  “You’ll be drowned like a rat in this rain,” she calls as the door creaks shut and I begin the slow and perilous descent to the dock.

  * * *

  It could be half an hour later or an hour later: I’ve never been colder in my life, as the freezing humidity has nestled its way into a crawl space I didn’t know existed between my bones and muscle. Each step takes twenty seconds to descend because I must first test my weight. My thighs wobble, and I’ve rolled my weak ankles on loose stones a dozen times. My waterlogged bag weighs me down further, and as I shiver, I touch my fingers to my lips, feeling no warmth or texture of life on either end.

  It could be said that I am in a state of panic, for I am no closer to the dock. I have not even passed all the cottages. My body feels like quivering lumps of mush trapped inside exhausted strips of muscle on the verge of shutting down. And my brain, my brain revisits the horror of Angel’s revelation again and again. The loudest part calls me a fool, a fool, a fool, all while the quiet part asks: But how was I to know that spirits could infiltrate the bodies of the residents of this rock for weeks on end?

  I rub my hands together to bring some warmth to them and immediately recoil as I remember Angel making the same gesture. I couldn’t have known: That’s the truth of it. Not when I only learned his kind existed long after meeting him. Not when he behaved so unlike the rest of them, handling me with care, day after day.

  I slow by a cottage, trying to take brief refuge in one, then another, pressing my wet hands upon the glass, only to find them empty and their doors locked.

  If Angel wanted to abuse us like the rest of his kind, surely he would not have treated me with such kin
dness, only to reveal the truth at last. Surely he would have another trick up his sleeve. I slump against the doorframe, teeth chattering and lips blue in the reflection of the glass. Mother: What would you say to me if you could hear me now? Would you call me naive for questioning this spirit’s true nature, when his brethren are so evil? Would you call me weak for running from the house now, unworthy of that circle of fierce cousins you built around us?

  I shrug off my bag. I always believed my mother’s strength stemmed from her certainty. I thought her strength only grew when she doubled that certainty, instilling her black-and-white view in others.

  I feel no such certainty now. More and more questions crop up in my head. My sole conviction is that conditions will not improve in this house of lost souls without intervention. To abandon my peers in this madhouse now, ignorant of this privileged and horrifying knowledge I have, would be cowardly and cruel. I might be the only person on this rock with access to someone who understands the darkness swallowing this house.

  I think of proud Yesi, alone and vulnerable in her room. Of sweet Lamm, possessed and in poor health. Of Mole, bewildered yet desperate to help however she can. Of the girls, fighting against invisible torture, even as they fade.

  I think it with a sinking stomach: I cannot leave them now.

  Yet I cannot forget about Angel, too: this otherworldly creature who bridged an unbridgeable gap to tell me a most painful truth.

  I need not be alone in this fight.

  I rub at my eyes, clearing them of rain. Perhaps I was wrong about my mother’s source of strength. Perhaps she knew strength comes from not feeling so alone, in spite of uncertainty, and she fostered that strength by drawing groups of cousins together around her.

  You have so much courage. You made it here alone, Angel told me once. And you’re so young. The young, the curious, we … we need to stay alive and learn everything we can. So when we’re older, we can fight smarter, together.

  It’s time to let the old rules fall away and fight, now. I cannot run forever.

  What to do when darkness overwhelms? That is one thing all of those I’ve loved would have agreed upon: We must gather up our strength and fight together toward the narrowing light. I hitch my bag back onto my shoulder. I know where I must go.

  * * *

  Domenico—Angel—is still on the patio where I’ve left him, also drenched in rain, as if in penance. He must have been here hours, yet his swollen face looks hopeful when he sees me. I stand inside the patio door, towel in hand.

  “Angel.” I cross my arms around the towel to stop their convulsions. “An interesting name.”

  “I know,” he says, wiping his face. “My mom named me Angel because she said I was born blessed, with a lucky star over my head.”

  I inspect him for some sign of a change, for some sign of possession, but I find none, only earnestness. He looks the same as always. Should I trust this curiosity and enduring affection toward this soul on my part, or am I still beholden to some flicker of dangerous intimacy felt toward what can only be a shell?

  “So you had a mother,” I whisper. “You were a living thing, once. A man.”

  What world, what womb does Angel come from, whatever Angel is?

  He rises to meet me, as vulnerable as I’ve ever seen him. “I’m not like Dom. I’m different. But you can call me him, since I’m in him now.” His lips tremble. “Do you care?”

  Do I care that he is dead? A spirit?

  An Other?

  Of course I care. I hunger to know why he was granted this singular opportunity for life after death when so many others were not. What did he do in life to be deserving?

  Or is his state a punishment, a limbo for souls with business left unresolved, as drilled into us by the ghost stories we hear as children?

  But I bite my tongue, knowing full well that questioning this soul’s existence will do us no good now.

  “Why did you befriend me?” I ask instead.

  “Because I’ve never met anyone like you,” Angel says quietly.

  If only it was that easy. And yet, this is the same Angel who was more assured than I was that every shade inside me would compose a glorious picture, even if its content remained unknown in full. The same Angel who offered up his love so readily—a tender, constant, boundless-seeming type of love I’d never seen. A type I never felt from the person I was closest to in the world—my own mother. And I’m not willing to throw that away until I understand why it was given.

  “Will you be honest with me from this point forward? Will you tell me everything I need to help us?”

  Two more questions I can only pray he answers truthfully because I cannot know for certain. And we know how flimsy prayers are on this gusty rock.

  “Of course,” he says, eyes blue and clear.

  I can smell milanesa oil burning somewhere. This is a moment to test my strength—to trust my instincts and come together, or die. I steel myself. As I approach my own battle with such strange foes, I wonder how I will be. Will I become a hardened warrior like my mother? Or will a fundamental gentleness remain in me, like in Tío Adolfo?

  “Then of course I don’t care who or what you are,” I say, throwing him the towel to dry off and breaking every rule I thought I knew about trust. “You are my friend, Angel. That’s all that matters now.” Both because I wish to believe him, this soul I have come to believe is good, and—and because I see no other path forward toward the light.

  24

  ANGEL: 2020–2400

  After my grand reveal, no daisy chains were woven and exchanged. No one danced through the meadow across the ice, hand in hand.

  Sure, I expected a blowout. But I thought that fight would be followed by blood bonds cemented; mafia rules. I can’t say why, because in admitting the truth, I exposed a months-long betrayal. But at least Mavi still speaks to me, and that feels like enough. It feels like more than I deserve.

  “We have a lot of work to do, Angel,” she says, motioning for me to follow her through the empty halls and upstairs. “A lot of house rules to break.”

  I hesitate, tripping over my feet behind her. “Work? Rules? What?”

  “You must tell me everything you know about the Others like you,” she says. “That was your promise.”

  My face is still swollen from crying, and I pat it down, worried someone will see us or overhear us. “Of course. But you’re not going to like it,” I say as we pass room 6.

  “I don’t have to like it,” she says, opening the door to her light apricot room and beckoning me inside. I sit beside her on the bed, with a glance at my closet. “Now,” she says, “who are they?”

  They being them, the bastard Others. They is generous, since she means you all.

  “We’re lost souls made of energy,” I admit. Because that seems like a decent enough entry point. “To exist, to inhabit others, to do anything, we need to maintain that energy. To maintain that energy, we have to eat.” I stop, consider my phrasing. Rub my hands together, as if that’ll help me cook up a decent explanation. “It’s not as appetizing a process as it is for you. When Others feed, it’s on dreams.” I think of every vibrant thread I’ve extracted from Yesi. “Others draw them out of their heads, like invisible fingertips sweeping through invisible cobwebs. If fingers were magnets, and cobwebs were metal fillings?” The tone of the statement rises at the end into a question, as if I’m a Valley girl, tripping inside her own phantasmagoria. Mavi sets her jaw, and I hesitate again. “I guess it can … dilute people’s memories.”

  “You’re feeding on the girls, and that’s making them sick,” she says, hands curling into fists. “And you possess them, too.”

  I blanch. “Not me. I would never do that to them.”

  “But you need to feed, too, don’t you?” There’s a sharp edge to her voice now.

  I could say I feed from Dom. I’ve tried, after all. If only his dreams were nourishing. “There’s someone here who doesn’t appear to suffer when fed from.” At least I do
n’t think so.

  She hides a frown, lips wrinkling. “That doesn’t exactly make it more palatable to me. Who is it?”

  I mumble Yesi, blood pumping hard.

  “What?” she asks. “Oh, Lord, is it me?”

  I shake my head. “Oh my god, no. It’s not you. They don’t feed from you. You’re totally unpalatable, speaking of. Nasty, I think.”

  “I don’t know whether to be relieved or offended,” she confesses. “But that doesn’t surprise me. I have nasty dreams like most nasty women. Who is it?”

  I sneak a glance at the closed bathroom door. “Yesi,” I whisper. “It’s Yesi.”

  She bites her lip so hard it turns white before refilling with blood. “That’s not possible,” she says. “Yesi doesn’t even believe there are real ghosts here. She thinks ghosts are symbols…” She trails off, her face turning gray. “Well, this would make her special. In a way she would detest. She—she wouldn’t stand for it,” she whispers to herself before clutching her stomach, and I think she’s going to be sick, but her hands move to her thighs, gripping them hard, and she whispers, “Do you think she knows? She can’t know.”

  “I don’t think so,” I reply.

  “How can we stop them from feeding?” she asks, nails visibly crimping into the flesh of her palms. “I suppose I shouldn’t ask you that. It’s part of your survival instinct, I gather.”

  A ruby-red flush stains my cheeks. She looks like a little girl stranded on the dark streets of Buenos Aires, miles from home. Helpless. And it makes me feel queasy.

  “There’s some writing about sacrificing girls to fend off the spirits, but the Zapuche and their shamans were the last to know how to perform the ritual, and they’re long gone,” I offer, and she nods, drifts off in thought. I’m overcome by a desperate urge to give more, to help her, even if it will only hurt me. “But the tenth girl might know more. And I think she would help.”