The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “Madame,” Morency says, her overgrown hands enfolding Carmela’s. “Madame, we cannot find your daughter on this rock, as we are. She has been hidden from you. But perhaps you can reclaim her once we gain more understanding outside. We must listen to the girls now to retain clarity. We must free the children and ourselves. And then—and then I will help you search for what remains of your daughter, until the last breath leaves my body. I swear it.”

  As expected, a promise from Morency is the only series of words potent enough to sway Carmela.

  “So be it,” she declares. “We shall do what you believed I might accomplish, Marguerite. We will help the girls into better lives.”

  * * *

  At a quarter to six, back in my body for what I hope is its last hurrah, I go down to the ballroom, which is in pitch-darkness but for some lit candles placed on the floor. I weave around the black slipcovered furniture, spotting the few figures that dot the room: Yesi, of course, who joins me and cradles my hand, whispering soft and urgent goodbyes in my ear, the same kind I once received from my mother. She is in charge of Sara and Michelle. Morency, her hair bound back once more, stands with a leather-bound book pressed to her chest. She is in charge of Isabella and Silvina.

  Mole, too, lingers by the edge of the room, her filthiness shrouded by an overlong pinstriped robe.

  “Thank you,” I say, approaching her.

  She nods with a warmth I thought lost to her, crossing her arms over her chest, and I notice the painful scratches of ink across her skin once more. Numbers and letters gouged so deeply again that there are pinpricks of false blood. She is in charge of Christina and Diana.

  We wait as the others trickle in. Carmela appears, face fresh—revitalized by new purpose—and head bowed in her black cloak. She is in charge of Mariella and Gisella.

  Mr. Lamm appears, a sheet wrapped around himself, curling inward with enduring private shame, watching the walls and ceiling as if they move. He offered his assistance to anyone struggling. Armadello, too.

  I feel as if I can feed them strength now. My cousins.

  At six, a hush comes over the group when Angel rushes in as Dom, the black slipcovers around us rustling. As he takes my hand, the others can’t help but stare at him.

  “The players are coming now,” he whispers to me.

  Morency reads from her written record of the sacrifice ritual.

  Vox puga pyga torque et tene. Secundam vel vim obtinet nisi ipsum pro potentia eu movet. Exspecta XV secundis.

  “I’m ready,” I whisper back to him. The flames on the candles surge, and the mural of the bland shepherd girl and her demonic Indigenous pursuer flashes luridly from the walls. I clutch Angel’s hand, closing my eyes and imagining our hands are hot, crafted from real skin and muscle and bone. I bite my lip to keep from screaming because of this new need of mine.

  Credo in XV secundis ante vel retro, et ne potentia copia ratio posse, et alterum a sustinere posse damnum de super terra, et cito. Preme potestatem eu mauris. Cum primum est in potentia eu, nota aliqua, aut alia nova nuntia perferenta aut partum. Proprie sile.

  And yet.

  “If anything goes wrong,” I whisper to Angel, “leave me and go back where you came from. That means room seven. Otherwise, you could be lost. I forgive you. And I thank you.” For he has provided my only means of escape ever, and I could not trap him here.

  He shakes his head. “I’m—I’m going to push you out,” he stammers. “And you’re going to take my closet. That’s what we agreed…?”

  I squeeze his hand harder. Poor Angel.

  Cum satus vestri progressio secundum opera sua plene onerarias persevera. Si tu es usura fenestras, per virtutem obvius satus puga pyga quod lego sile. Si tu es usura a pomum strepitando menu ratio eligendi sile. Vox puga pyga torque et tene. Vox puga pyga torque et tene. Vox puga pyga torque et tene.

  Morency chants into the darkness, eliciting a tremulous hum from the core of the house.

  Vox puga pyga torque et tene. Vox puga pyga torque et tene. Vox puga pyga torque et tene.

  I feel our energy growing, our power as a group. It makes me want to believe our words alone could escape their neat sound waves to infiltrate the layers of this world and change everything.

  Vox puga pyga torque et tene.

  Yesi joins in first. I join in. Angel, too. They are instructions. I look around the group, all of us chanting now, and I feed them all the courage I can.

  Vox puga pyga torque et tene.

  Morency’s chants turn melodic as others follow along. It’s beautiful and strange, our song echoing across the midnight landscape of the room—the speckles of candlelight reflecting off argent sconces on the walls. I can feel other presences joining us, drifting around our insensate black-robed audience of forgotten furniture, like unbound clusters of energy. Angel’s hand begins to cool then. I take a shaky breath. It cools and cools until I feel I have a block of ice in mine.

  All of a sudden, the others in the circle jolt in place, juddering and jiving, as if to rid the flesh from their bones. They’ve all been taken under the same outlandish spell, as I instructed. I told them to act possessed, to slump to the ground. To feign falling asleep and coming to the end of our life cycle this go-around. I fight a smile. I hope the creator is watching and believing every bit.

  I turn to look at Angel, in some effort to reassure him privately that this was planned, only to see him splutter. Splutter for air, as if the atmosphere has become toxic. Panic sneaks its way up my spine with prickling fingers. The others continue to chant, their chants melting into half moans from the shaking, the quaking, the seizing. Angel coughs wetly; his eyes roll back into his head as his limbs tremble. He falls to the floor with a hard, slipping thud, dragging me down with him.

  “Angel?” I ask, kneeling beside him. His eyes are distant. “Angel?” A shout pulls me out of the tight circle of my present attention.

  I have no time to lose. The creator might’ve seen me already and wondered why I am immune—he might know immediately that this is a distraction, meant to tear his attention away from what’s going to happen soon, if everything goes well. I refocus on what I must be doing, on what I must do to have a chance at a real body, a chance at being alongside Angel. I shake on my knees as if some great hand is scooping out the insides of my brain with a rusted spoon. And though I don’t expect it, the world around me spins on a great axis. I feel them, at least I think it’s them. Players. Others.

  They came for us, as Angel said.

  The sacrifice ritual is working, I think, my mind flooding with fresh fear.

  Cool and warm and tickling and harsh, they fight inside me, all at once. A wave of tremulous energy, gaining force, swelling into overwhelming pain. I hold them off as best as I can, but it weakens me all at once; I lose touch with my fingers, my toes. My eyes. I didn’t expect this onslaught. It’s happening so much quicker than I thought. It might be too late for me to do what I must do, to unlatch with Angel’s help. I could be taken and subsumed, suppressed, pushed deep down into my consciousness as I was that time in the family hall.

  I can only hope my friends managed to escape their shells already. It’s turning blacker. I’m still on my knees, but someone’s taken my hand, which feels like a soft flipper of a thing. Angel?

  “Go to the cupboard, Angel,” I shout. “Go now.” Cupboard, closet. I hear someone shout. It’s far away, the noise. I fall across Angel, it must be Angel, who is curled up with his eyes closed; he looks so pale and dead. This might be the last moment I ever see him—the version of him that was here. My vision forms a pinhole around him. I feel that same urge he sparked in me to have my own flesh and blood. To cross over, to connect, to convert and be converted. I cannot believe these feelings will die, even if I am doomed to another round. I cannot believe it. But I am still trapped inside my prison when the pinhole of my vision tightens, my brain eating reality around it and spewing out black heat, crystalline strips of numbers frying in the painted world.

/>   34

  ANGEL: 2020–4200

  In the hours before the sacrifice, I leave Mavi and Yesi, lay Dom to rest, and fly up out of the house, into the thundershower raging outside.

  This storm, that trapped them all, that sounded like machine-gun fire, that tore shutters from windows and tiles from roofs:

  It is splendor.

  I feel waterfalls of shivering thrills: Through the battering winds, through the jags of hot lightning, through the world-shaking thunder, every nuance of the legends told by Mama comes to life—a spray of chameleon butterflies explodes over the crumbling ridge of the main building, rolling through every pastel shade, underpainting every blackened cloud. The ice, giant milk teeth, crowning a crystalline lake alive with fantastical, gelatinous creatures. Furred, majestic guanaco running through rippling fields of porcelain orchids and lady’s slippers and siete camisas and dandelions and evening primrose. Tangles of the spike-thorned, fleshy, fruited chupasangre, named bloodsucker despite giving life to the Zapuche for centuries. The waxing moon, a shy apricot sliver in a candy-colored swatch of sky.

  I saw her paint this landscape so many times—I saw her lovingly layer each color with an impossibly thin brush over months and months, only to start over on a blank canvas, as if each version got her closer to the awe she felt toward this view of her homeland in her memories.

  It’s a compression of Mama’s violent imagination, an imagination that could never rest, that could never stop breaking the world apart and rebuilding it more beautifully.

  Wonder, until the very end.

  I don’t want this to end almost as much as I know it must end.

  Charon meets me, as promised, on his cloud chair for an impromptu therapy session. I don’t know if it’s guilt, some surviving respect for Mama, or what—but he sits, shaping his face into an expression approximating concern, as I vent about every possible piece of bullshit I can imagine. I treat him like the shrink I never had. I talk until I swear my crystal throat hurts—until I feel so weak I worry I won’t be able to reenter Dom.

  * * *

  After the sacrifice ritual starts, a pressure builds on me as Morency chants. Builds, and builds, and builds, until I choke. Maybe I’m imagining it at first, in placebo-pill fashion. Maybe it’s a delayed reaction of horror. But it’s not just Morency’s chant making me feel like there’s a Komodo dragon in my throat hatching and crawling toward the light. I’ve never been so good at sensing Others while in Dom, but I feel them now. I feel them surround me, their sticky, porous shapes, and I imagine them jeering, poking, prodding. I feel them rubbing up on me, pressing me out of Dom, undoing the sticky barbed-wire Velcro connecting me with him. It’s a brutal process now, unlatching, like wrenching staples out of your fingernail beds. Every crystal cell of mine wants to screech and fight them off, but there’s no touching something that isn’t there.

  Mavi’s face has gone gray-green with concern, and I shape my mouth into the words needed to tell her it’s all right, when I feel a solid chunk of myself sluice out of Dom. Another, chunky and silver-gray. I see Dom’s pale and handsome face, and I know this is the last time I will be inside him, before—plop.

  “Angel?” she asks. “Angel?”

  He falls to the floor, like a sack of old meat, and I’ve never seen him look more defenseless. But I don’t have time to cry about it; it’s only then, when I’m outside of him, that I see all of them. Tremulous shadows, pressing hands against his scalp, against the bodies of every poor soul in the room, scratching at old scabs of memories until fresh blood trickles out. They circle me, the me I can barely see myself. I glimpse Mavi from the corner of my eye, dropping onto her knees beside Dom. Is she chanting to herself, still? Is she chanting?

  I need to push her out. I need to free her. It’s what I’ve promised. It’s what I owe. But she won’t lie down on the floor. She keeps shaking Dom.

  “Go to the cupboard, Angel,” she says. “Go now!”

  I can’t make sense of her words at first; I think of what she told me once, about hiding away in a cupboard in her mother’s house when they came to take her mother away. Cupboard. Cupboard? She’s telling me to abandon ship and save myself, but how? How can she ask me to leave her? I want to remind her I will be fine; I want to tell her I’ll come back for her; I want to tell her I will find her and help her, help all of them.

  “Stop it, Mav,” I cry. “I’m good. I’m good.”

  But I can’t communicate, and she won’t stop mothering him—me. She won’t relax.

  I flit over to Yesi, who has long since collapsed, and I thread my crystal hands into her, feeling for her weakly fluttering presence, and nudge it out. There follows a warm rush of blue.

  The buzzing of the room dulls; I feel myself breathing heavily somewhere, somehow; I feel that my face is wet and hot. I rush back to Mavi, draped across Dom. Immobile. Her eyes open and entirely blank. My hands plumb her skull when I see him, her, it. The tenth girl, the creator, Charon. Floating above us all in a long white gown. She shakes her head at me with a most elegant pity and compassion.

  “But tell us how you really feel, Angel,” she says glibly, floating out toward the ceiling. She lets out a belch. “Oh well. Better luck next time, kid.”

  I am trying to feel for Mavi inside her body and crying somewhere as I fail. I’m giving in to panic when the Others reach me, probing me, puncturing me, sucking me dry. I’ll stay until they do, I tell myself. I’ll keep trying until I can’t try anymore.

  But Mavi’s words flood my head.

  If anything goes wrong, leave me and go back where you came from. That means room seven. Otherwise, you could be lost. I forgive you. And I thank you.

  Why would she say that? Can I even die here, as Charon once threatened? What would happen if I did? Wouldn’t I wake up, no worse for wear?

  I can’t leave this place.

  Unless Mavi and the characters have changed the rules of this place, as I know she planned to do.

  My intuition tells me to trust in Mavi’s power. To trust in Mama’s hand that shepherded her into existence. So with that last residue of energy, I drag myself back down the hall, up the stairs, and into room 7. The walls shimmer, cobbled from scales, each of them light apricot, the shade of Mama’s smiling lips.

  I could spend a lifetime in this game and still fail to answer all my questions about her.

  I hold my breath and push back into the closet.

  The world around me, the imperfect petri dish that is Vaccaro School, it fizzles at the edges and is eaten down to black for good.

  35

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  When I wake, light bursts from a dime-size nub in the sky. I watch the waves of color pass, dazed. How is it that the clouds have evaporated? How is it that I can watch the bright daytime sky with such clarity?

  Do I remember, or am I reverting back to being an empty shell, ready to be filled with manufactured memories and characteristics?

  I think I am intact.

  I cycle through what I remember: Angel. Yesi. Carmela’s daughter. Morency’s past. The creator. The girl. Worry and fear, spilling over.

  I am intact, and wondering if I am intact alone is proof that I am. Isn’t it?

  I check the edges of my vision: The roof of the house has cracked open, as easily as an eggshell; the walls around me tremble and sigh, and between shivers, the stones take on the quality of translucent fish scales. I lift myself up onto my elbows. I am alone, paler in the bright light. The other attendees of the vigil, my friends and peers, Yesi—they’re all splayed on the ground beside me, fainted, helpless and lifeless as dolls. Rubber-skinned. Flickering, if I look closely.

  Yet I didn’t escape my flesh made of numbers.

  Why wasn’t I possessed?

  Why didn’t I forget and evaporate, either?

  I’m here, just as I was before. Painfully intact. A survivor of the onslaught of the Others, the players. I come to my feet, straightening.

  I kneel by Ye
si—I press my hand to her forehead. She is lifeless. There is no pulse—not even a false one—and her skin, as stony as usual, has taken on a translucent pallor. Her body is an empty vessel, uninhabited. I fight the lurch in my stomach.

  This is a good sign, I think to myself, that her body is empty now. A first success. Yesi has succeeded, with or without Angel’s aid. Keep going, I tell myself.

  Morency, next. I crouch beside her black gown, lay my hands on her black-wrapped skull; I feel nothing. I feel nothing inside at all. She does not breathe; her blood does not move. I could shout or swoon with relief.

  “Where are you?” I whisper to the air around me. I still want confirmation. Is that movement, motion I feel around me? Invisible life? I wonder if it is my friends, released from their bondage.

  Mooning at the sky, I hear a sucking noise, as if the contents of this rock, our perch, are being slurped into the heavens by ill-mannered and starving gods.

  I jerk back: Figures jitter into being, barely perceptible shadows ripening into flaky, crystalline fish, before hardening into solid bodies. Strangers. Absolute strangers.

  Men. All kinds of men, old, young, skinny, fat. Men in casual dress. Gawking at one another. Grinning at one another. Bearded, thin-lipped, redheaded, dreadlocked, plump-cheeked.

  “Fuck yeah!” one yells. They don’t notice me. They clap hands. They move around the blond wood floor like anybody else. I shiver: They must be players. Players given form and shape. It’s bewildering, watching a being be born into this world in the same way those chameleonic butterflies landed upon a single stone. Others come to life.