The Night Sister

by Jennifer McMahon

  He remembered what Margot had told him last night: “Sometimes a lie isn’t what’s said, but what’s unsaid. An omission.”

  Later, when he went to get into bed, she’d told him icily that she’d prefer it if he’d sleep on the couch.

  “What?” he’d asked, stunned.

  “I think we both need some space,” she told him flatly. “And time to think things over.”

  He’d spent the night tossing and turning on the lumpy couch, replaying every decision that had led to this. Surely it would blow over, was just a matter of Margot’s hormones making her overly sensitive—he’d never seen her so cold before. But, then, he’d never really lied to her before, had he? And he shouldn’t have pushed her about her own omissions, not now. Not when being upset could put both her and the baby at risk.

  He pushed the thought away and went back to scanning the crime scene, every horrific inch of it.

  The girl had been found by two fifth-graders walking home after school. There was a path that ran through the woods behind London Elementary School to Butler Street. A lot of kids took it. The muddy ground was covered in footprints and bike tire tracks. It was a goddamn thoroughfare. So how is it that no one had seen or heard a thing?

  The girl’s name was Kendra Thompson. The kids who’d found her recognized her right away, in spite of the condition she was in. Her face was intact, but her body…it looked…like it had fallen into the lion pit at the zoo. Jason had never seen anything like it. Not even in those zombie movies he watched. That stuff—that was nothing.

  “Where’s Louisa?” a woman called. Jason turned. It was Mrs. Buffum. She’d worked in the front office since Jason was a kid, and it was clear she’d be there till she died. Mrs. Buffum was part of the school, like the brick outside and the cracked porcelain bathroom fixtures. Her well-padded rear end had earned her the unimaginative nickname “Mrs. Buttum” back when Jason was a kid. He wondered if anyone called her that still.

  “Louisa?” Jason asked. He was the nearest officer, the one who was supposed to be controlling the crowd, keeping the people back, while the state crime-scene guys did their job.

  “Louisa Bellavance. Or ‘Lou,’ I guess she calls herself. She came in to school earlier today. I was surprised to see her—I thought she was taking some time away. But I looked out at the playground during morning recess and there she was, playing with Kendra. They were sitting together on the swings, laughing.”

  “You’re sure?” Jason said. “You’re sure it was Lou you saw her with?” Jason’s heart slammed in his chest.

  “Positive. I thought how nice it was that Louisa had come back, that she was playing with her best friend. It seemed like just what she needed after all that horrible business with her family—to be a normal kid again, playing on the playground.”

  Jason jogged over to the group gathered around the body, and tried to keep his face composed while he delivered the news. “Hey, Chief Bell, a school employee just told me the victim was last seen with Lou—Louisa Bellavance. The kid from the motel.”

  “Jesus,” said Tony Bell. “So maybe our guy kills Kendra and grabs Louisa.”

  “Or maybe she ran?” one of the state cops suggested.

  “Quite a coincidence,” Tony said. “Louisa’s whole family being slaughtered a couple days ago, now her school friend.”

  “What if…” Jason said. “What if Louisa was the target all along? The other girl just happened to be with her?”

  He thought of Margot’s insistence—and his own gut feeling, if he was being honest—that Amy hadn’t killed her family at the motel. What if they were right, and the real killer was out there still? But he’d left a survivor, a potential witness.

  Then he remembered his visit with Rose Slater.

  “Do you believe in monsters, Jason?” she’d asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he’d told her.

  “Neither did my daughter. And look what happened to her.”

  And now look what had happened to little Kendra Thompson. Jason wondered if she’d believed in monsters.

  “We need to find Louisa Bellavance,” Tony barked. “Now!”

  Rose

  The girl kept interrupting, asking all the wrong questions. She didn’t understand. Once the evening med cart came around—and it would any minute now—they’d watch her take her pills, and twenty minutes later she’d be out. At least, that was the case when she actually swallowed the pills, which she usually did. The next thing she knew, it would be morning, and the day nurse would be coming in to pull back her curtains and give her her morning pills and talk about the weather. They’d put an alarm on her bed last week (which Rose allowed them to think she couldn’t disable, though of course she could, just like she could tuck her sedatives into her cheek and spit them out into a Kleenex once she was alone, when she so chose—she wasn’t an idiot, despite what they thought).

  They weren’t going to lose her again. It looked bad for the staff to have a resident go missing, as Rose had, time after time, for hours.

  Sure, folks wandered. It’s what people with dementia did. They confidently waltzed into the wrong room, and cried out in alarm at the stranger in their bed. They went into the closet thinking it was the john, or down to the day room at midnight to soothe the baby they thought they heard crying. Many of them were just looking for the way out, the way home. But the staff always found them somewhere on the locked ward right away. Not Rose. Rose’s disappearances had confounded them. They always took place at night. She’d be discovered missing during rounds, some time after midnight. They’d search all night and into the morning for her. Then, inexplicably, there she’d be, back in her bed, by daylight, wondering what all the fuss was about.

  “I’ve been here all along,” she’d tell them.

  “Well, you must have been invisible,” a nurse once snapped.

  Rose had smiled at that. “That’s me,” she said. “The Invisible Woman.”

  The one nobody sees for what she truly is.

  The staff all called her that from then on: “How’s our Invisible Woman doing today?” Not to her face, but to each other. Sometimes they called her “our Houdini.”

  She liked the air of magic it gave her. She didn’t like how they always prefaced it with “our,” but she knew it was the truth. She was theirs. Their prisoner. Their problem.

  Only they didn’t know the half of it. Could never have guessed.

  Eventually, the staff decided enough was enough: Rose might hurt herself, and the facility would be at fault. They installed the bed alarm and began giving her enough sleeping meds at night to tranquilize a cow.

  This suited her fine. For the first time she could remember, she’d wake up feeling rested.

  Rose was pulled back to the present as Piper pushed open the heavy curtain and looked outside. It was dusk, and the clouds were thick and threatening, making the sky darker still. “I went down to the room below the tower,” Piper said. Rose squinted at her, tried to picture the woman before her now as the little girl she’d once been: the girl who’d roller-skated with her Amy, flying around in cut-off shorts, with the little radio they carried cranked up as loud as it could go. Piper had never met Rose, but Rose had seen Piper plenty. She’d watched her that summer. Spied from the trees, from the tower. A few times, she’d been nearly caught—by that silly boy who was always hiding in Room 4, and then by Amy, who would awaken in the night and catch her mother watching her from the shadows.

  How many nights had she spent like that, hiding in the shadows of her daughter’s room, waiting, watching, seeing if she might change—if Amy was a mare, too?

  “Shh,” Rose would tell Amy. “Go back to sleep. You’re dreaming.”

  “I was there today. The twenty-ninth room,” Piper said now, leaning in, and speaking more loudly than she needed to. “Someone’s been down there recently. Someone’s been using it.”

  Rose nodded.

  “Tell me, please,” Piper said. “Is she back? Sylvie? Did she have someth
ing to do with what happened to Amy and her family?”

  Rose looked at Piper, but was listening to the noises in the hall outside. Through the din of voices and bells, she heard the unmistakable clacking of the med cart’s wheels rolling down the hall, but there were still a good four or five rooms before hers.

  “Listen carefully,” she said. “I am going to tell you the truth, but we haven’t got much time. You mustn’t interrupt.”

  “Okay,” Piper said, leaning even closer.

  “It wasn’t Sylvie being kept down in that basement. Sylvie is dead. Has been for over fifty years.”

  “Dead? Are you sure?” Piper gave her an am-I-dealing-with-a-poor-senile-old-woman-after-all look.

  “Of course I’m sure, silly girl,” Rose hissed. “I’m the one who killed her.”

  1961

  Mr. Alfred Hitchcock

  Universal Studios

  Hollywood, California

  October 2, 1961

  Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

  I think there is something wrong with me. At least, I hope there is. I sincerely hope that I am delusional.

  Because, Mr. Hitchcock, I believe my sister Rose wants me dead. I think there is something wrong with her, terribly wrong. She has always been jealous of me, but these days, it seems so much more than that. There’s an icy hatred in her eyes.

  I wake up in the night sometimes and find her bed empty.

  Worse still is when I wake up and find her standing over me, staring down.

  Once, I woke up and she had her hands around my throat.

  Though I know I will sound insane, I must tell you the worst of all: One time I swear I saw a creature crawl into her bed in the middle of the night. I thought at first it was a dog, or a small bear, but it wore human clothes: Rose’s dress. As I stared at it in the moonlight, it burrowed under the covers, and I closed my eyes in horror. When I dared to look a moment later, there was my sister, her head on the pillow, appearing peacefully asleep.

  In the morning, there was dark, coarse fur on Rose’s pillowcase. And her sheets had the rank stink of a wild animal.

  What is my sister?

  And what is she capable of?

  Yours truly,

  Miss Sylvia A. Slater

  The Tower Motel

  328 Route 6

  London, Vermont

  Rose

  Even though Sylvie had disappeared, they made Rose go to school, pretend that everything was normal.

  “There’s nothing you can do moping around at home,” Mama said; she packed a tuna sandwich for Rose in a paper sack, tucked it into her school bag, and sent her on her way to meet the bus. Mama, who never cried, had been crying all morning. She wouldn’t look Rose in the eye; she seemed eager to get rid of her.

  Daddy called the police, Rose learned later. Sylvie was reported as a runaway. Daddy went down to the train and bus stations, flashing a picture of Sylvie, asking if they’d sold her a ticket or seen her. Nobody had.

  “Probably headed for Hollywood,” Mama kept saying. “That girl has stars in her eyes. Has since the day she was born.”

  Sylvie’s friends were all shocked to hear the news; they denied knowing anything about a plan to run away. They did say she’d been acting strange lately, and they’d guessed that she might have a secret boyfriend. When asked for any details about this boyfriend, none of them knew a thing—it was just a feeling they all had.

  Her closest friend, Marnie, suggested that Sylvie would go straight to Universal Studios to look for Alfred Hitchcock. When the police followed up, Mr. Hitchcock’s assistant told them that he did not know anyone by the name of Sylvia Slater from Vermont, and Mr. Hitchcock had never received any letters from someone by that name. But, yes, the assistant would certainly contact the police if any girl fitting that description should show up at the studio.

  Rose checked that all Sylvie’s letters, the ones she’d stolen from the mailbox and opened over the years, were carefully hidden. She didn’t want anyone to find them. For years, they’d been her secret view into Sylvie’s world. But there would be no more letters.

  That night, after her parents were fast asleep, Rose sneaked out of her bedroom and went to the workshop, where she grabbed the flashlight she’d carefully unpacked from the bag last night. She went down to the tower. She thought of the night before, of Sylvie speaking to her from the shadows: “What is it you want from me?”

  Rose’s head began to ache as she entered the tower, flicked on the light. She went all the way up to the top floor and shone her light around, half expecting Sylvie to be there, hiding in the shadows.

  She remembered their fight, which had been so like a dance, and the expression on Sylvie’s face just before she fell backward off the tower: utter horror.

  Rose turned off her flashlight and sat with her back against the cold stone wall. She looked up at the stars and wondered what the night sky looked like in faraway places, places like Hollywood, where Sylvie wanted to go.

  There were footsteps below, on the ground floor of the tower.

  “Sylvie?” Rose called, half hoping it really was her sister. Not the least bit frightened anymore by the idea of her being a monster; of what she was capable of. If only it was Sylvie; if only Rose was all mixed up about Sylvie and Fenton and mares and luna moths.

  Someone was climbing the ladder.

  Rose heard breathing. She froze. Listened to footsteps move across the second floor and then steadily up the final ladder. She stood, holding the metal flashlight over her head like a club.

  Hands came into a view, gripping the rungs of the ladder, reaching out to the floor.

  Familiar hands.

  Not Sylvie’s.

  Mama’s hands.

  “What are you doing up here?” Mama asked, as she pulled herself off the ladder and stepped gracefully onto the floor.

  It was odd, seeing Mama in the tower. Even though Daddy had built the tower for her, Rose couldn’t remember ever seeing Mama inside. She seemed, now that she thought about it, to avoid it.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Rose explained. “I thought maybe I’d come down here and find Sylvie. She used to come here sometimes. At night.”

  Mama looked at Rose a minute, considering. It was the first time Mama had looked her in the eye all day. But her expression was strange, unfamiliar, apprehensive. It was as though Mama was meeting a person she didn’t know (and wasn’t sure she liked) for the first time.

  At last, Mama stuffed her hands into the pockets of her wool coat and said quietly, “I heard you and your sister fighting up here last night.”

  There was a bright flash of pain in Rose’s left eye. She pushed her thumb into the socket, trying to massage it away. She desperately wanted to climb back down the ladder, go up the driveway and into the warm safety of the house, crawl into her bed, and sleep. Maybe, if she went back to sleep, this whole day would disappear.

  “You did?” Rose asked.

  Mama nodded in the darkness. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Rose closed both her eyes. “I followed Sylvie to the tower.”

  “With a backpack full of traps and chains?”

  Rose swallowed hard, wondering how Mama knew about the backpack.

  “I wanted to catch her. I knew you would never believe me—you’d never see her for what she really was unless I showed you.”

  “What was she, Rose?”

  “A mare—at least, I think so. I’m almost sure. ’Cause they do exist, Mama, just like in the stories Oma told me when I was little. And I know the reason she told me so much about them. She knew that Sylvie was one. She was trying to prepare me. To teach me all about them so that I would know what to do, how to stop her if I had to.”

  And she had stopped her, hadn’t she? Rose’s head was pounding ferociously now, the pain shooting through her left eye like an icicle.

  She clearly recalled the walk back to the house last night, the heavy knapsack thumping and clanging on her back; in her hands, she’d carried t
he luna moth in the net. It had struggled at first, then held still, resigned to having been captured.

  Mama stepped closer to Rose. She settled on the floor beside her, leaned against the cool stone wall, and sighed deeply.

  “Oh, Rose,” she said sadly, softly. “You’ve got part of it right: Mares do exist. Your grandmother was one herself.”

  “No,” Rose said, “she couldn’t be!” It didn’t make sense. Oma had told her such horrible stories about these creatures and the things they were capable of.

  Mama continued. “My mother never used to remember what happened once she’d transformed.” Mama’s expression was one of pity now. And remorse. “She’d come home, clothing torn, blood under her fingernails—she would never have any idea what she’d done.”

  Rose’s head swam. “But…wasn’t she dangerous? Weren’t you afraid she might hurt us when she came to visit?”

  She remembered the safe feeling of being in Oma’s arms, the smell of horehound candy, the lulling sound of her voice.

  Mama shook her head. “I wasn’t too worried, no. My mother had learned to control it quite well—apparently, better control comes with age. As an extra precaution, there were pills she took at night, sleeping pills that kept her from transforming when her guard was down.”

  “But, still…to invite a”—Rose thought the word “monster,” but could not say it aloud—“someone who could do those things, here, to stay with us…”

  “Mares have a way of recognizing one another, of sniffing each other out, you could say. That is why I invited her, to spend time with you girls, so that we would know if either of you was a mare. She told me she was sure neither of you were, that we were safe.”

  “But that wasn’t true,” Rose said.

  “No, it wasn’t true. I believe my mother knew it, even then, and lied to me.”