“I can’t explain it,” she went on as if she were talking herself into something. “I’m still not sure I believe it, but I have to try.”
“Things will get better,” he insisted.
“Yes, they will.” Her voice cracked as if her very body disbelieved the words. She pulled away, and the simple motion was the hardest of her life. The small blue hat fell from her lap and she turned quickly, remembering the woman, but Laura had left silently during their exchange. Hannah leaned down to pick it up, then, seeing her hands shaking, left it there, half-hidden under the hospital bed.
Callum mumbled weakly, his eyelids struggling against sleep, as Hannah peered behind the curtain separating the room in half. The other bed was empty and recently made. Atop the sheets, there was a long, thin imprint. A reptilian body, the scales pressed into the sheets through its weight. She touched her hand to the bed and could almost feel it, like the echo of a pulse. It had been here, she realized, but for the first time, she hadn’t been aware of it. Hadn’t been afraid of it.
She walked briskly past Callum’s bed. She glimpsed his eyes still half-open, no longer fully understanding where he was or what was happening. As she paused in the doorway, she remembered an old myth of a man sent into the bowels of hell to retrieve his wife, who then lost her with a simple but forbidden backward glance. The opposite was true. If she turned, her face disproving her words even as she spoke them, she would be frozen in her tracks. He would never let her leave. And seeing him, the kinks of his curls, the curve of his mouth, she would allow it.
She walked out.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The tears, heaving out of her, finally left her empty. Graydon mewled as he followed her around the house, pawing at her ankles. She unlocked all the doors, opened all the drapes, and lay down on the couch. She lit a white candle and placed it, tentatively, in the kitchen window. It illuminated only her own wavering reflection in the darkened window.
Her last thoughts before she slept were of Callum, and with her eyes swollen shut and her tongue parched, she said goodbye to him. The trees outside were lit by the full moon, and she waited for whatever would come.
But nothing did and she slept deeply.
When she woke, all the doors and windows were wide open, a loose scatter of leaves the only sign of trespass. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and understood. The house was no shelter. Something was teasing her.
Phantom cracks appeared and dissolved across the walls like roots pulsing from inside the plaster. For once, Hannah didn’t care. She moved to the tall grass by the shed and sat down. The morning chill seeped through her dress and sweater. She was waiting, although she didn’t know what for. The baby was wrestling inside her, chasing helplessly after its father like a hamster in a wheel. She rubbed her hand over her belly in circles, singing snippets of lullabies, and rocking back and forth over a growing soreness in her pelvis.
It was then that she saw the crows, crowding on the branches around the house. Their squawks were a harsh laugh, echoing from every corner of the swamp. A light mist drifted off the water, and through the fog, hulking trees rose like fireworks frozen mid-burst. Hannah hugged her sweater around her, and tried to shake the sense that even if Martha’s boat were to float by, Hannah would be invisible to her.
Every few minutes, her breath caught and sent her into gasping sobs. Even the tears that made her vision swim were caught, unwilling to fall. Mae had smacked her gently on the head many times during her childhood, chastising her for second-guessing herself.
“I’ve never understood faulting a child her misery over spilt milk. It’s a sad thing. But to sit there and mope over a choice you yourself made, without any strong-arming, is just plain stupid,” she’d said, and Hannah’s generous pout would suck back in between her lips. “What’s done is done, and you can rest easy knowing it was done by you alone.”
A whistle, clumsy and high-pitched, sounded in the swamp. Hannah squinted through the fog. A pale figure was rising out of the water. Hannah gasped when she recognized the girl.
Sarah Anne stood in the water. Her curls were wet, the dip of her waist elegant as a cello scroll. The skin on her arm was unbroken, as if the fire had never happened. Hannah stood slowly, using the wall of the shed to support herself, and shook her head pointlessly. Fear paddled desperately in her heart, urging for flight. “Not her,” she pleaded.
As Sarah Anne came closer, Hannah saw that her face looked as it did when they’d first met.
“Who are you?” Hannah asked.
“Your playmate,” the girl said. “You sent him away. The man of the house.” Her voice was mocking.
“He had nothing to do with this.” Hannah hid her face in her sleeve. She tried to focus on the sensation of the wool scratching her lips, anything that might ground her in the rules of the real world. She understood that Sarah Anne couldn’t possibly be twelve again. But the girl’s pungent breath, like meat gone off, smelled as real as the must in her sweater’s sleeve.
The girl’s face shifted, became more mature, as she watched Hannah. The changes were incremental, as if her features were an aerial map, storm clouds moving. Had she always looked so much like Jacob? He was hidden in the strong line of her jaw, her hooded eyes. Hannah couldn’t remember.
“What do you want?”
Sarah Anne’s nostrils flared. She turned her head and scanned the placid waters. “Retribution.”
“I was a child,” Hannah countered. “I was terrified. I’ve done nothing to you.” She inched backward.
The woman’s lips thinned, her hair momentarily darkening. Tricks of light were dappling the woman’s face, despite the uniform gray of the day. “You have, as she has. You’re the same, the cells and the light beneath it. Yours is so warm, so mild. So mild, with child.” Sarah Anne giggled and reached out her hand toward Hannah’s belly.
Hannah balked. “She who? Christobelle?”
“Don’t speak her name. It offends us,” the woman hissed. She seemed taller than she’d been a moment ago, her shoulders squared and wide, her breasts smaller. A burst of rich chestnut brown was spreading like an ink stain over her right iris. Hannah felt a pang inside her, as if a vice had tightened in her belly.
“Jacob lived for a few hours, then died that night. I saw him part the flames, crawl out on all fours like an animal. I heard him scream as if he wanted to split open the skies. He was blamed for the fire, but he would never have harmed me.”
Sarah Anne drew a breath.
“That night, in the hospital bed, he writhed and moaned. His legs shot out, his neck bulged with the effort of sitting up. But he couldn’t. There was something sitting on his belly. I saw it then, saw it in its multitude. All the hollow men that died by your mother’s hand. I touched him, and for a moment, his eyes cleared. He looked me in the face, my poor sweet Jacob, and screamed. When his lips closed, he was dead.” The woman let the words sink in. The fog released itself in small droplets down her skin. She stroked a finger through the air as if writing on a blackboard.
“I’m sorry.” Hannah tried to repeat the words to herself, tried to etch them into her mind, into some tissue that would always remember and always feel the shame. For a moment, she leaned forward, exposing her neck like an animal surrendering. But then the child kicked inside her, reminding her of what she had to lose. Of what she refused to surrender.
“I’d heard them whisper before, calling out in the darkness. I’d heard your name in the cries of birds. They visited me sometimes in the night. Sometimes, they looked like my brother, or another man taken by your mother’s hand. Sometimes as a presence I couldn’t touch. Some nights, they’d sit there on my stomach, many-legged and many-handed, and watch me with their many blinking eyes. I couldn’t move.”
The pressure in her stomach grew and Hannah took an uneven step backward, trying to mask the pain. She cradled the bottom of
her belly like a basket.
The woman continued in Sarah Anne’s languid, playful voice. “But the night that my family died, the night that Jacob died, they spoke, and for every night after. And they were right. You are just like your mother, sacrificing others for your own gain.” Sarah Anne closed her eyes and sniffed the air. “Every time I smell smoke, I’m reminded of that night. She set the fire, your mother.”
Hannah reeled. “She wouldn’t.”
“You’re her child. She thought she was protecting you.”
Veins crept up Sarah Anne’s arm, twisting like snakes and turning the skin to a coarse, blistered red. Sarah Anne gripped her swaying wet hair in a fist and pulled it off. Hannah’s knees nearly gave out at the sight of the woman’s smooth scalp. The wig fell into the grass. Hannah stifled a scream.
“My uncle put me in therapy; I took fistfuls of pills. One day, their whispers turned to yells. Constant, unyielding, and so loud I felt flayed.” Sarah Anne paused. “I resisted at first. I tried to convince them that you were different from your mother, but they helped me see that you are the same. They promised me vengeance. They promised that you would ache, and I surrendered. I gave myself to them.” She ran her hands down the sides of her waist, then up to circle her neck like a choker. “They coiled inside me, feeding on me, and we are stronger for it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Hannah said, panting with the effort of remaining upright. There was tightness in her chest, a pounding pulse like war drums in her ears. The pain in her stomach came in waves. “You never deserved any of this.”
Sarah Anne smiled sympathetically and gripped Hannah’s chin. The cold from her fingers shot through Hannah’s body. “Sorry is not enough. We’re so hungry.”
Sarah Anne’s sudden punch pushed Hannah backward against the shed with a force that cracked the wall. Hannah’s gasp echoed in the swamp’s silence, then bubbled as blood welled in her throat. “Why?” she whimpered. Hannah slid down the shed’s wall and lay down on her side. She braced her hand against Sarah Anne’s bare leg, trying to hold her back.
“We died because of her. We went willingly, like livestock over a cliff. We’ve tried to harm her, but she’s powerful beyond reason. But we can harm you now. We can take this. We want this.” The woman knelt beside her and gently touched her stomach. Then she slapped Hannah, and pushed her face down against the dew-wet grass until mud seeped into her mouth.
Hannah coughed and felt her thighs flood with liquid. An ant, teeter-tottering on a blade of grass, tickled her eye. She was grateful for the release of pressure in her abdomen and reached down to feel between her legs. She sighed with relief when her hands came away simply wet, not viscous with the stick of blood.
“That old woman, the black one, protected you for so long. She was strong for so long. She nourished you. The whole house pulsed with life.”
Hannah could feel the woman changing again. The sudden stretch of skin, the movement of bones, was sonorous. When she spoke, her voice was low. “We were here at your birth. It was our time. Your mother should not have lived, but that woman intervened. Her, and her orishas. They judged us and found our case unworthy.” The sentences were clipped now, a garbled accent coming through.
The woman, if it was that, grabbed her right hand from between her legs. Hannah looked up into a face like a patchwork quilt, features roughly sewn together, the edges blurred as if in a dream. An eye gazed at her with tenderness, as a mouth, breathing heavily, sneered.
“We cannot harm her. She cannot harm us.” A tongue coated in white darted out between the thing’s chipped teeth. It pushed back Hannah’s index finger. Hannah seized in its grip, then the world went white and deafening with static as the bone snapped.
“We make our own justice,” it said. With one hand, it held the slender bones of her forearm. With the other, it pushed back her right wrist until the nest of bones there snapped. Hannah only groaned. She tried to turn her body away, but it grabbed her waist and whirled her around as if she were a rag doll.
“Please,” Hannah mumbled, and felt tears spill down her face. She stared blandly at her limp wrist. Her instructions to move it trickled down her arm. The ache in her belly had returned, and she recognized the rhythm from the birthing books. She was contracting.
“No,” she groaned, and tried to shimmy away. She looked toward the house, wondering if she could make it to the back door. “It’s too soon.” The baby couldn’t come yet. Something moved behind the kitchen window and disappeared into the hallway. Hannah glimpsed a crushed crimson dress, a candle flickering, before her vision whited out again.
The creature had her pinned by her knee, its foot nestled in the joint. “Soon,” it echoed, then pressed down. “There is no soon. There is no time. There can be no regret.”
It turned her over by the shoulder and straddled her. It was no longer Sarah Anne, no longer recognizably female. With one finger, it circled her belly button. Hannah hit at it with her good hand, but the creature didn’t even blink. It placed the tip of its thin, cracking nail in her belly button and pressed down. Hannah remembered the crow’s beak, the beading blood.
Hannah’s neck felt impossibly weary as she let her head fall back against the grass. Above her, the treetops formed a circle, framing a patch of perfect white sky. The fog was absolute.
“That’s enough.”
Hannah didn’t look. The voice was familiar enough, the rasp that came from treading the fine line between worlds. She couldn’t differentiate between the white of the sky and the white unconscious. Only the jolts in her belly stirred her.
“No,” the creature said, but it loosened its grip. A note of uncertainty entered its voice. “You have no command.”
“Step away from her,” Christobelle continued calmly.
A contraction reddened her vision, and she cried out. Above her, the creature had morphed. Its legs were jointed like a mantis, its scalp a history of injuries.
“This is our due.”
“You’re owed nothing,” Christobelle said, and the creature hissed and rose off its haunches. “Our bargain was fulfilled. You all saw what you needed to see; I delivered my promise. Nothing comes without a price.”
“This is our price,” the creature howled and threw back its head. Tendons were knotted like tree roots. It screamed at the sky and dug a knee into Hannah’s belly.
The wetness between her legs was becoming thick. She could almost feel red seeping from her body, and in her mind, it was the dark crimson of poppies. To her right, her mother held up her hands. “Stop. There are two lives.”
“We are innumerable. We are legion, for we are many.” It chuckled dryly. “What are two, compared to that?”
“She didn’t enter into this bargain. Her child,” Christobelle’s voice quivered, “is blameless.”
“It is not our concern.” The creature’s kneecap felt like a gavel against Hannah’s womb. For a terrible second, she saw its faces, countless torments whirling like negatives across a white screen. Its hand closed around her neck.
“Take me!” Christobelle shouted.
The creature stepped back and raised its head, considering. “How?”
“However you wish,” Christobelle said quickly, and sunk to her knees. She showed it her palms in a gesture of surrender. “Please.” She looked around. “I know you are here. If you can hear me, I do not know which of you can grant this, but please. Let me make this right. Let it end with me.”
The creature licked its lips. “You would do this?”
The woman nodded and her shoulders slumped.
It cocked its head, listening to the voices that Hannah could almost make out, then it looked at Hannah, who panted through the agony. Her insides felt scraped, growing more raw by the second.
Christobelle held up her hands and shuffled toward Hannah on her knees. A low, throaty growl sounded from the creature, but it allowed the
woman to come forward. Her skirt was sodden with mud.
Beyond her, Hannah saw bodies. The hazy shapes of men and women, tall and wavering as trees, standing around them. She could almost hear the low hum of conversation. “Who are they?”
Christobelle looked at Hannah with an expression of wonder. “You can see them?” she whispered.
Hannah squinted through the haze of tears. “I can almost see them.”
“I’m so sorry.” Christobelle smoothed Hannah’s hair. Hannah could tell from her shaking hands, her rough motions, that she was unsure how to soothe but sincerely wished to. Hannah didn’t flinch. Instead, she closed her eyes and whined through another contraction. Christobelle’s touch moved to Hannah’s injured hand, her cold fingers barely registering on the swollen tissue.
“I never meant for this.” Christobelle was speaking quickly, and when Hannah opened her eyes, she saw her mother’s face sagging with regret and knew it was a mirror of her own. Hannah clenched her teeth, but a scream tore out of her. “You have to push now,” Christobelle said, her voice taking on an edge. “Push hard. Take ten quick breaths, then push.”
“I can’t. It hurts too much,” Hannah stuttered. “It’s too soon.” She jammed the hem of her dress up between her thighs and squeezed, pulling rather than pushing. It felt as if a razor blade was couched in the muscles of her womb.
“You don’t have a choice, sweetheart.” Mother and daughter looked at each other. The word hung between them like a tightrope walker. Christobelle broke eye contact first. She ran her hand along the circumference of Hannah’s belly. The intimacy felt natural, and Hannah could almost imagine Mae in the gentleness of the touch. She blinked up at her mother.
“I have failed terribly, in all things,” Christobelle murmured, more to herself than to Hannah. “I couldn’t protect you. I couldn’t protect your father, and after I lost him, I spent every moment longing for one more glimpse of him—” Christobelle’s voice caught. “I lived my whole life with the dead, and in the end, failed to live at all.” She squeezed Hannah’s good hand as another contraction seized her body like an electrical jolt. “Push,” she reminded Hannah.
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