Deirdre frowns. Her soft hair is rumpled and matted, her neat braids gone. There are so many bruises on her.
“We’re in the basement,” she says. “The Housemaster brought you in a month ago. You were so ill.” Her eyes swell with tears. Gently she eases my hands out of the restraints, and I’m able to sit up. But after lying on my back for so long, this causes a head rush, and more of those bright lights. I rub my forehead and blink several times until the lights are gone.
Deirdre, I think. What has he done to you? She’s only a child—nine, ten years old, but she’s as haggard as a first generation in the worst shape, her skin yellowed and pruning at the elbows and fingertips, the bones in her face sharp and too defined.
But I don’t ask the question right away. Whatever horrible fate has befallen her is my doing. When I ran away, I took away her purpose at this mansion. Vaughn could lie to his son and say that, in my absence, Deirdre would be better employed elsewhere. Linden wouldn’t even question it. He trusts his father.
Still the question comes, almost against my will. “What did he do to you?”
She shakes her head. “Early treatments, I think,” she says. “Soon he’ll try artificial insemination,” she adds timidly. “From what I understand, the Housemaster thinks he’s found a way to speed up fertility and gestation, so girls can bear children before natural puberty.”
The words are so unreal coming from her warm voice that I’m sure I’m dreaming. But seconds pass, and nothing strange happens, like the ceiling caving in or the floor trying to swallow me.
“It hasn’t worked yet,” she says, still avoiding my gaze. She is behaving like a domestic suddenly, tucking the blanket at my waist, rubbing the circulation back into my wrists. “Lydia has been here much longer than I have. She almost carried to term, one time, but . . .” Her voice trails off.
Lydia. Why is that name so familiar? While the fog is still clearing from my mind, along with any suspicion that this is a dream, I remember. Lydia was Rose’s domestic, sent away after Rose became so distraught over losing her newborn daughter that she couldn’t stand the sight of the young girl who’d tended to her affairs.
“Deirdre.” I reach for her, to gather her in my arms, to comfort her. But she is beyond comfort, and she inches away.
“I think I heard the elevator,” she says, staring at her hands as they knot around each other. “I’ll be back when I can.” She hurriedly helps me back into my restraints, and then she skitters from the room.
When the attendants come, I feign unconsciousness, but my heart is pounding. One of them takes my blood pressure—I feel the band tightening around my arm and releasing with a gasp. Too high. This is cause for great concern. It sets them muttering about side effects and palpitations.
The nightmare is throbbing all around me. The squeal of carts, the rattle of tools they’re using to monitor, prod, and inject me. I feel something on my forearm, and I wait for the sting of a needle, but all I feel is a light pressure, hear a series of mechanical beeps.
The top buttons of my nightgown are undone by cold dry hands. Something cold splatters onto my chest—some kind of gel, I think. Something moves along my breastbone. I know it’s a piece of machinery, not a human hand. They’re running some kind of test. I feel like something less than human. An experiment. A cadaver.
It’s okay. I won’t let anyone touch you like that ever again.
But there is no one to save me.
Eventually the attendants clean me up, scribble their notes, and leave. I hear one of them saying, from very far away, “What do you suppose he’ll do with her eyes after he’s done with her?”
Something new is swimming in my veins after that. And that’s when the real nightmares begin. Faces, mutated and decomposing as they lean over me. Ghosts hurrying in the hall, whispering my name. A tide of blood splashing across the tiles. Linden, standing in my doorway.
His sad green eyes are trained on me.
“I thought you didn’t love me anymore,” I whisper, and he turns into dust.
Since there are no clocks, and the holographic window is always showing me the same degree of fake sunlight, I have no concept of mornings and evenings. I suspect it’s morning when Deirdre visits me, because she is always disheveled as though she just awoke. There are so many tubes and wires springing from my arms that it doesn’t even matter if she frees me from my restraints, because I can hardly move. She whispers nice things to me, describing her father’s paintings, admiring aloud the many shades of my blond hair.
I am almost never lucid enough to respond. I suppose she gets used to this, because eventually her sweet stories take a dark turn. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you,” she whispers. “I lost another pregnancy.”
I cannot even find the strength to open my eyes, but I think if she knew I could hear her, she wouldn’t be saying this.
“Lydia died this morning. I watched her bleed out. And the Housemaster was there when they wheeled her away.” Her voice cracks. I feel the pressure of her soft fingers weaving through mine.
“She knew things, though,” Deirdre says, her voice heavy with impending tears. “Rose’s baby? I told you I’d heard it cry, before the Housemaster announced it was a stillbirth. Lydia told me she saw it. She saw the baby, and there was something wrong with it. Its ears were shriveled, and its face was—wrong somehow. Malformed.”
My heart starts pounding again, in that helpless, futile way. It’s the only thing left in me that seems able to move.
Rose. Linden’s first wife, perhaps the only one he ever truly loved, was forced to give birth alone at the hands of a monster. She knew what he was capable of. She warned me not to cross him, and I didn’t listen.
Deirdre is still talking, but I can’t hang on to consciousness long enough to hear what other horrors she tells me.
Chapter 24
THE DREAMS break like water against rocks.
When I open my eyes, my first thought is that my little sister wife has gotten taller. And prettier.
A strip of light from the fake window hugs her cheek, then darts to her shoulder as she turns. For an instant her red hair is entirely ablaze.
She doesn’t realize yet that I’m watching her. She moves candidly, humming a little, dancing as she pours pitcher water into a paper cup. Her hair is wrapped around her head haphazardly, rivers of it coming down her neck, which has also grown to be slender and more elegant. I think of the winged bride with her hair in a beehive skipping the way to her wedding—that little girl was already growing up when I left the mansion, weathered by childbirth and grief, but she’s grown much more in my absence. There’s a vague hourglass shape to her.
I ignore the fat black bees that swirl around her, and eventually they disappear. She stays, even when I remind myself that this can’t be real. I am so grateful to see her—this soft, familiar presence, that I am sure I must be dreaming. I welcome this dream, though. Perhaps I can live in it for the next four—no, three—years. While Vaughn is turning my body into his playground, while my brother is roving the earth to no avail, I can live in this safe imagined place. Maybe I can even dream up some June Beans that haven’t been tampered with.
“Awake now?” Cecily asks, her back to me. She spins around and carries the paper cup of water to me. “The air is dry down here. I thought you might be thirsty.”
Not a dream. She’s really here. Testing my abilities, I move my arms and legs, find that they’re still weighted by tubes. Cecily lays her hand on mine and says, “No, no, don’t try to move. You’ll hurt yourself. Here.” She holds the cup to my lips, watching me drink it, with not quite a smile or a frown on her lips. She looks like she wants to say something, but for a long time nothing comes.
There’s a soft light radiating from the ceiling tiles, making all the edges appear fuzzy and soft like the camera filter in Jenna’s soap operas.
“I hid in the hallway and heard them talking. They said your heart rate was through the roof. They thought it was going to be a heart attack,” Cecily says, and there’s sympathy in her voice. There’s something else, too. Remorse? Shame? She won’t quite meet my eyes. I must look pretty terrible, because she traces her index finger along the curve of my face and chokes on a sob.
For better or worse, Cecily will always be my sister wife. Nothing can undo what we’ve endured together. We will always be connected. And at the sight of her tears, mine come immediately. I turn my head to stare at the wall, trying to will them away before they roll to my cheeks.
“Oh, Rhine,” Cecily says. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done by coming back? You’ll never get out now. Not ever.”
I close my eyes. My chest shudders with a sob. What she says is true. I’ll never see my brother or Gabriel again. The way things are going, I’ll never even see daylight again. I had my chance, and I failed.
She leans forward and kisses my forehead, and all I can register is that she smells like Jenna. That assured, womanly blend of pretty scents and pastel lotions.
“I have to go before Housemaster Vaughn catches me down here,” Cecily says. “I blackmailed an attendant I caught sleeping in the library, and he let me use his key card. I just—” She sniffles. “I had to come. I never thought I’d see you again.”
I don’t answer her or open my eyes. As long as I stay perfectly still, the tears won’t fall.
She doesn’t go right away. She runs fingers through my hair and whimpers and apologizes, muttering about things so long ago they don’t matter anymore. Or they aren’t her fault.
And despite my best attempts to stay awake, I begin weaving through nightmares of still infants with malformed faces, hallways that carry a baby’s cry, houses that hold unspeakable horrors drawn in black ink, spinning in holograms before me as Linden beams with pride.
I finally manage to say words out loud. “Did Linden really denounce me?”
But Cecily is long gone by then.
Hushed, angry voices. A whinnying baby noise.
“But you’ll kill her,” Cecily says.
“We know what we’re doing,” a voice says. Not Vaughn. An attendant, maybe.
“Let me see her. Let me see her or I’ll scream.” Cecily’s tone is pleading but fierce.
“Scream all you want,” the voice says. “You’ll only be hurting yourself.”
She screams anyway, over and over in my nightmares. I follow her through uncertain depths, down long hallways, stepping over bits and bones and shivering bodies. Her red hair is full of sun; her footsteps are piano keys pounding out a nonsense song. And then, just when I’m sure I’ve reached her, she’s gone.
