The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “Don’t even think about it,” he says, watching me peer over the edge again. “I can go there on my own, out of Dom.”

  I bite my lip. “But even if you do make it over there later, I won’t be able to join you,” I say. This fact feels inordinately important. I rub at my temples as if it will energize my failing brain. I look closer: It’s difficult to tell in the near dark, but yes, the landing does have a door leading to the outside of the building, suggesting it opens onto a balcony of some kind. On our side, there is no door leading outside—only a shuttered and locked window. I crouch beside the window frame, juggling my lit candle, and feel the stone below, which is a lighter color than the stone around us, as if it has been recently placed and lacks weathering. It is abundantly clear to me in my mad state that this window was once a larger opening—a door, too?

  “Look!” I shout to a baffled Angel. “Did you ever look out this window before they closed the shutters?” I ask him, feeling at the seams of stone with one hand, as if they will commune with me. “There must be a porch outside, connecting to the door on the far-side landing.”

  “There might have been a porch.”

  “I’ll climb through the window to the door.” I point at the landing. The hinges on the door open inward. “Easy.” I blow out my candle and throw the stub across to the landing with the pack of matches.

  He watches me for a long moment, candle flickering by his chin. “I’ll go first.”

  I grimace at him.

  “For obvious reasons,” he says, motioning to his Dom body. “Not because I’m some macho piece of shit.” He hands me a candle, and I toss it onto the landing as he moves toward the window. “Let’s see if we can even open the shutters.”

  I follow him, and we work together to unlatch it. One lock jams, and Angel knocks it with his foot until it pops free. We wiggle the panel of glass up—the external shutters remain closed—and a burst of wet, bone-chilling air sprays us both, extinguishing the candle.

  “Jesus.” I clear the mist from my eyes. A vicious wind whistles through the open slivers between the shutters; it is only a matter of time before someone hears the whining and finds us here like a couple of drowned cats. We hurry to push the glass farther up, farther up, our sleeves and torsos soaked, and contrive a large-enough entry point to the patio I am sure waits outside. I spit the water from my mouth, clear it from my nose. I squeeze my eyes closed against the bursts of wind and rain, ignore the chill penetrating my slick skin. Angel presses at the external shutters to no avail, before kicking at them again; one of the two flies out and cracks against the stone facade before unhinging and flying toward the ice. I can’t help but recoil. The sleet, strong enough to crack glass, soaks us and the surrounding carpeting with gray water, thick with ice crystals; my skin stings as I pinch off clinging bits of ice.

  Angel the courageous pokes his head out of the window and darts back inside, red-cheeked and dripping. “There’s no balcony,” he says, wiping his eyes with his back to the opening. “Only a ledge about a hand’s width wide.”

  Only a ledge. I swallow the lump in my throat and shiver from the wet cold.

  “I can go,” I say, pulling back my hair. “I’ve small feet. You can hold on to me.”

  He doesn’t meet my eyes. Miniature crystals fringe his eyelashes. I frown: He looks sickly in the dim light, and I remember his complaints of weakness. “The invincible one always goes first,” he says, smoothing a fleck of ice off his cheek. “Seriously, Mav, this isn’t about my trying to be a knight in shining armor over here.” He shuts his eyes, turns back to the window, and swings one leg over the frame.

  I take his forearm in my hand. “What happens if you fall?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, flashing me a look. “Does it matter?”

  Of course it does, I want to say.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I say instead. And yet, I urge him on. I rub the soaked fabric on my arms and wait as he positions himself on the window frame. At least there appears to be some kind of ironwork anchored to the side of the building between this window and the door, supporting a useless, shattered lantern.

  And the door: The door is an oddity itself. Its frame hangs there in the middle of the house’s outside stone wall, leading nowhere. I’m swallowing my swollen heart as I watch him sidle over to it, shaken by wind and rain. He can barely see—neither can I. The faintest, eerie light emanates from nowhere at all—distant light reflecting off the ice, perhaps. He takes one pace, two. A whining of the ledge, audible over the rush of the storm. As he gropes for the handle, he sways on the ledge, dips a hair. The ledge is giving, giving before my eyes. I could choke. If Dom’s body falls, if his skull cracks, where does Angel go? And Dom—is Domenico’s spirit lost? It occurs to me then that Dom already is. But I don’t care. I’ve only ever cared about Angel.

  I’m desperate to help this person I can’t ever know. I lean over the railing and reach for him, as if that will stabilize him; he takes hold of the knob at last and turns it to no avail; the door won’t budge. He presses on the door with the handle turned, and there’s a shift of some sort. He lifts a foot to use the stone wall beside it as leverage, and a massive groan rips through the metalwork of the ledge. He replaces his foot.

  “It’s jammed,” he shouts into the wind, “I can push—” The shifting rain breaks off his words. The storm will tear him from the ledge and crack him on the ice below. I know it. As the thought courses through my frantic mind that I might lose him, a hundred belated questions bubble to my lips: Where do you go when you aren’t in Domenico? What are you like? Could we ever meet as ourselves?

  He takes the knob again and kicks against the door with a heavy foot once, twice, three times, the ledge weakening, but the door creaks, metal against metal, and he falls against it.

  The blessed door opens inward.

  I watch from inside the house as he collapses in a heap on the landing across from me. “Lord Almighty, Angel.” I droop onto the railing with relief, waiting for my pulse to slow.

  He sits up and props himself beside the open door, which threatens to suck him back out. “Don’t come over, Mav,” he says, wheezing. “That sucked so much.”

  “It’s fine—if I scramble over right now, I can make it.” I peer out onto the ledge he traversed. It hasn’t collapsed. “I’m not letting you go on alone.”

  He aborts a sigh, too familiar with me now to know he would get away with such a proposition, and leans out the door, propping himself against the edge with his hands outstretched and ready to take mine. The wind abates for a moment, and I pull myself over the window ledge, the ridges digging into the skin of my palms, before tenderly dropping each foot onto the ledge, like a tightrope walker after ankle surgery. The sky, black shot through with swirling gray masses, shudders and breathes above us. Clouds form a giant maw, spreading wider, gnashing their teeth, hungry for fools. The ice mass beyond does not console; there is no softness to its facade. My skull would smash open upon it like rotten fruit. My fingers, gripping the grout of the window ledge, are blue.

  “Come on, reach,” Angel says, his words blurred by the furious wind. “I’ve got you.”

  An irregular flash of lightning highlights the angles of his face. The absurd truth is that I believe he does have me, this inhuman soul, a kindred spirit, a safe haven. I close my eyes to protect them from the sleet and reach for the ironwork above—

  “Jesus, Mav, are you stupid? Don’t close your eyes,” he shouts. I wrench my lids open. He’s only a meter and a half away. I wiggle myself down to the ironwork, and I clamp one hand around it, which sticks to the iron like a tongue to a frozen pole. I edge along farther, feet slipping against the pitiful ledge. When I lose feeling in my fingers, a sharp pain stabs my mouth—I’ve bitten a chunk of flesh from my inner cheek. But Angel’s outstretched hand is only a couple of footsteps away now. I breathe through my mouth, tasting metal, and release one hand from the ironwork, lunging for him.

  “Just a little bit farth
er,” he says. “You’ve got this.” His hand glows in the turbulent air. I only notice it as I sweep his fingertips with mine: It gives me the fleeting impression that he could disappear and reappear at any moment, like the lightning itself.

  A creak beneath me precedes a stomach-dropping fall of a few centimeters; my tiptoes alone remain planted on the ledge—my hand still clutches the ironwork.

  “Reach now!” Angel shouts. Without thinking, I swing myself over to him, shaking and shivering, weightless for a single moment, and he clutches my hand, wrenching me up so hard my arm might crunch out of its socket.

  “Let go of the damn post,” he shouts. But I can’t. Intellectually, I know I must—my grip on it is weak—but physically, I cannot. He squeezes my hand and wrist until they ache, a pressure I feel despite numbness. “Come on. Trust me.”

  I let go, dropping onto the ledge with both feet; with a groan, it bends to nothing, supports flattening against the stone exterior. My legs pinwheel in the air, smashing against the stone, bruising my knees and providing no grounding; I’m sure I’m done, I’m falling, I’m dying, having managed nothing. But instead of the colossal drop, an excruciating pain roots up my shoulder, and I hang in the air. Angel pulls me up, limbs dragged over the rough stone, up, up, and over. I gasp and paw at the floor of the landing edge dumbly with my dead hand. With a groan of adrenaline, he reels me in beside him, and I clamber, like a drowning dog, onto the landing island, heart boring a hole in my chest.

  I burst into tears—stupid, hot drops that blister my iced cheeks. Angel pulls me farther inside and kicks the door shut.

  “Goddamned stupid,” I splutter, curling into myself as he takes me in his arms. I look up at him, wet eyelashes shrouding his eyes. As far as my eyes, my ears, and my hands know, Angel does not exist beyond this temporary human shell that is indubitably not him. He cannot exist as his true self in any way that can be proved by my measly human senses. Yet he does exist, and he is here, holding me, risking himself on my intuition.

  Yesi once said that ghost stories help us reconcile ourselves with the unfathomable and unknown. In spending time with Angel, my own life has become a ghost story, and I am glimpsing the wonder in the darkness. What if the beauty of our relationships on this earth is in their transience?

  Lightning illuminates the landing through the lost far window, still sucking the room out into the abyss as Angel holds me tight.

  “You’re okay,” he says, pulling me to my feet, and with his pronouncement, I feel I become so. Okay. There’s a special faith in our relationship. And while I might not understand its nature in full, I know it is one of the most delicate and precious commodities in this world.

  * * *

  We collect ourselves, take stock of our candles and matches, talismans in the dark. Angel uses a match to light our two candles, bringing the landing back to life. I skulk over to the solitary door on the landing, dripping with rainwater. We cannot return the way we’ve come. Taking a long breath, I try the doorknob. It swivels easily, as if greased in anticipation.

  Inside, we face an interior hall pitched in darkness. I see four plain doors, two on each side—no light peeks from beneath any of them. We try the first on our right, opening into a purple sitting room, dotted with the same unattractive and tiny furniture as the rest of the house. Preserved, however, and well-kept—resembling the inside of the house when I first arrived.

  I spot a single book: a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in English. I run my damp finger over it and find it oddly clean of any dust, despite the heavy air.

  “This must be where she rests so comfortably,” I whisper to Angel, my chest filling with a staticky excitement I thought had been lost.

  The second door on the right opens into what appears to be a bedroom with a solitary, rickety twin bed inside—canopied and perfect for a little girl. A smile dies on my numb lips. I shudder at the sight of so lonely a bed, unpaired with any other furniture, not even a rug to warm the girl’s feet. But someone has made the bed with care—hospital corners. The pink bedding smells of clove, a familiar scent I once associated with Christmas, and I shiver intensely. “Oh, Angel. This is it. This is hers.” I sweep my wet hair from my cheeks. But where is she?

  The third door opens into a closet. It’s dark. Cramped. Airless. Empty but for a raggedy stack of newspapers. The stench of dry rot overpowers me; I’m reminded of the closet in my home, the miserable hole stinking of urine and fear. The copy on top is a Buenos Aires paper, the edition itself a few years old. It doesn’t make sense. Old newspapers, stacked as my grandmother once did. I’m struck by an overpowering déjà vu, a sense that a wretched energy waits here, coiled. My knees weaken. I excuse myself and wait in the hallway while Angel checks for openings and emerges unsuccessfully.

  We try the last door, breath bated. It opens into the worst room of all, a little child-size bathroom-cum-kitchenette, with a cheap Formica counter against one wall, a minirefrigerator, a toilet with a stepping stool below it, and an empty sink with a dripping faucet. The rhythmic dripping sounds so ominous in the claustrophobic room. I try the refrigerator, and it opens, revealing a plate of fresh quince and cold fried chicken cutlets. I smell them. Unspoiled, though power has been lost.

  “Hers,” I whisper to Angel. “They must be hers. But how does she keep it clean and stocked? And where is she?”

  He shrugs, his eyes far away. I know what he’s thinking: It looks as if it’s a set of rooms meticulously prepared for a future occupant. No one lives here now. And I know what else we are both thinking: After hours spent wandering a house we ourselves dubbed a maze, we are legitimately trapped without a way back to refuge. I rub the length of my arms—my clothing is still so wet I could wring it out.

  “Well,” Angel says, examining the kitchenette and rubbing his palms together, “I wonder if there’s someplace to dry our clothes.”

  “There’s something more to this place,” I say, suppressing my disappointment. “There has to be. We’re so close to finding her, Angel. I know it.”

  Angel checks the walls for hidden seams, leaving a trail of wet footprints and finding nothing. “I swear this worked in a detective book once,” he says, shrugging.

  * * *

  The adrenaline fades with every passing moment, and a chill fills its place. But I can’t yet bring myself to peel my soaked coat from my shoulders.

  We stand in the hallway, empty but for these four doors, feeling like contestants in some cosmic game show. That’s when I open the third door, the closet door, once more. He follows me. I stand there for a good minute, listening to the silence, before I knock on the back of the closet.

  It makes a hollow noise. “See?” I smile. Of course, who’s to say it leads anywhere other than crawl space.

  He runs off, only to return with an ugly antique lamp from the dresser in the sitting room, and hands me his candle. “Do you think the girl would mind if we trash her closet?” he says before slamming the blunt base of the lamp into the back of the wall. His movements are violent and demonic in candlelight. With each crash, his face contorts with effort, and the wall splinters. When he knocks an irregular fist-size hole into the ragged wood, I peer into the darkness beyond.

  The corridor beyond is pitch-black and constructed from a less lustrous wood than the rest of the house. It smells of sawdust and old sweat. If I listen hard, it seems to breathe.

  “There is something more to this place,” Angel whispers, our cheeks rising above our candle flames.

  We prop our candles in the mangled lamp, precariously, and fashion a large hole, sweating in our wet clothes. I climb through first to help us tear down more of the closet wall from the other side, stopping myself from imagining what lies in the darkness. As muscles I haven’t felt in ages ripple and throb, my ears disobey and furtively search for life behind me, identifying a low hum of some kind.

  “Do you think any of them have made it back here?” I ask as Angel climbs through to join me. Them. The word leaves a so
urness in my mouth.

  “I don’t know,” he admits.

  We inspect the length of the corridor for another point of entry or exit and find a small door on the far end, locked, and while Angel jiggles the knob and tries to force the lock, I tap along the walls, my ear pressed against the wood. I’m miming along like a fool when wood cracks beneath my heel.

  “What was that?” Angel asks.

  A creaky floorboard below me shifts under my weight, exposing a chip of light.

  “Do you hear that?” he asks. He blows out the candle he brought through and slips it into his pocket.

  I can’t hear a thing. Whispering, perhaps. The beating of a heart. I don’t know. Angel leaves the door and tries to pry the board up with his hands. He manages to move it an inch, the strip of light widening. I can hear it now. Speaking. We spy into the space below, one head at a time, one eye at a time. The space is vast, much larger than this hidden room, though constructed from the same shoddy, roughly hewn wood. It is empty barring an oversize fireplace, which houses too many lit candles to count—hundreds of waxy pillars alight, at least. How could so many candles burn in this house without our knowing? Without our feeling the heat from where we sit now? The candles lend the room a smoky, religious ambience, and I whiff heady incense.

  I see the figure at the far end of the room, a huddled figure in all-black rags. Rocking back and forth on the ground. I shrink away from the gap instinctively before closing in again. It’s not the girl I saw, that’s for sure. In fact, at first, I think it’s Morency. The heap of black could be no one else.

  Except that stray strands of white hair peek out from beneath her black hood. It is an unfamiliar woman, speaking aloud, chanting. An older woman, wearing a loose, floor-skimming skirt, an oversize black shirt, and a hood that a monk might don, all cut from heavy, old-fashioned linen. The edges are frayed, yet when her slender hands peek out of the sleeves, they are angled elegantly on their wrists, like a fine lady’s. As the light flickers against her, she straightens the photographs lined up before her. Little black-and-white photographs. It’s a shrine.