I dreamed myself back in the clearing where Marlowe had buried the shinbone, walking with great purpose yet unable to name my destination. Although I was sleeping, I felt awake in a way that I had not been before, aware of the world and its wideness. The scene was strange, but did not feel strange. Of course my movements should be guided by some distant, shimmering magnet, a reeling that I felt within my heart, pulling me closer toward . . . I paused, the intensity frightening as I considered my burgeoning bloodlust.
I’d never worried about evil. I’d read tales of horror and found them too elaborate and glamorous, strewn with apparitions, doomed lovers, mysterious curses. Such scintillations were a joke. There was no silver-blooded sexuality about death; there was only the fact of it—the way that it went with the earth. The power I had felt as I’d confronted each new animal was no demon possession—it was me. Each desire that compelled me was mine. If this was true, where was I going? What would I find?
Some questions are birthed, rather than asked, and having been born they will cry until tended. I knew the story of Pandora’s box. I knew the cost of Eve tasting the apple. I didn’t care. I was led by my desire.
“Maisie.” I jumped to hear my father.
“Peter?” I stood in the forest, looking at him as if I’d just peeked in his office door.
“Maisie, my girl,” said Peter. He was not standing before me, and yet I could see him, the way he’d turn back from the desk in his office, that circle of glass at his eyes, an eyebrow raised above it. Have you come with the tea?
“Maisie?”
I kept walking.
“Maisie!”
ONE MIGHT THINK that with my powers of resurgence I’d be quick to recover from physical harm, but to my constant frustration, that had never been the case. My scraped knees required the same time as anyone else’s to regenerate skin. When I broke my arm at seven (a silly story involving a desperate attempt to hush an inconsolable wren by offering a bit of bread out of a window, all the while trying to keep my arm off the tree), I had to wait the full six weeks for it to heal.
I was suffering from a square inch of excoriated skin, a gruesome patch on the inside of my arm below my elbow. Any sudden movement seemed sure to disturb the clotting process. I winced at my makeshift bandage, grimacing at the grimy floors of the basement I knew all too well, the rusted, dirty chains that reappeared around my ankle, the steady dripping of old water from the ceiling. A headache was hammering through the edges of my skull.
I felt a spasm crawling up my chest, summoned my strength, and sat up, releasing all the contents of my stomach. My sick splashed across my blanket, my cot. It stained my paper gown and seeped onto my bandage. The pain in my arm was an inevitable constant, and I felt a throbbing tightness in my stomach, as if my bowels were getting ready to release. Still, the headache and the dizziness seemed to have passed.
A sudden image in my mind: Coulton’s hands across my body. My strip of skin, pink and pulsing. The way he held it to the light as if a conquest, a lens through which his life would change. My abdomen curled again. I shuddered, wet dress clinging to my skin. What if Rafe were to come down here now and see me so pathetic? Surely he’d at least replace my clothing, rinse my cot. So far he had granted the most basic human dignities: a bucket of hot water weekly to bathe myself, food, the lovely drugs that helped me sleep. If he needed my blood, he needed me alive. He needed to know that, despite my appearance, I would stay alive. If I died or took sick, his past few months would be for nothing. I thought of Coulton’s words: We have to keep you fit. If I was seriously ill, what would they do?
It was a gamble, I knew, to even contemplate the question. I poked at my bandage, and the pressure of my fingers sent a darkness to my brain so extreme that I was sure I would be sick again. Would vomit be enough? I didn’t think so. They’d give me a shot of something, another sedative. What I needed was to frighten Rafe so much that he’d immediately remove me, not only call for help but carry me off to a hospital. Once I was there, in an emergency room, in some country doctor’s office, in his van . . . One thing at a time.
My stomach cramped with my decision, tightening and pulsing. I spit on the fingers of my right hand to clean them, my mouth still sour and dry. Pulling up a corner of my bandage, I gagged at the pus. I had to time this correctly. An artery, once found, would bleed out fast. I couldn’t let myself lose consciousness. I sat very still and listened for any sign of movement up above. I had no way to mark the time. How much had passed? Thirty minutes? Three hours?
Then, sound at the top of the stairs. Distant voices.
Bracing myself, my front teeth sharp against my lip, I pressed my fingernail deep into the mess of my injury. The pain was so immense that the room seemed to seesaw. I felt a sticky rush of wetness pooling under me, and was grimly pleased to note that my incontinence would only help my cause. Shifting myself slightly, I prepared to dive again into the abyss of my wound, when I saw the patch of color slowly seeping, turning my gray hospital gown red.
Blood.
Not from my arm, which was producing its own hot seep of infection, but blood from my insides. Deep, thick clots. A flood.
THERE WAS DISGRACE, I had been taught (by books, of course—Peter had never broached the subject, and Mrs. Blott just frowned at me and said I’d learn in time), to monthly bleeding. Menstruation meant uncleanliness. Blood was shameful. It was excess, embarrassing, an obvious sign of sin. And yet I never loved my sinful body more than in that moment, when it delivered me precisely what I needed: both a tangible tool by which to save my own life, and the promise of a future as a woman, a reason to live it.
A quiet current of pride had always run beneath the deep shame of my body: that although I was a monster, I was special. Matthew’s attention had strengthened this conviction, as, in a twisted way, had Rafe’s. But all at once I saw that pride for what it truly was—a buttress to prevent me from entirely collapsing. I wanted so much to be normal. I wanted to build, rather than conquer, and I’d resigned myself to the fact that I never would.
For the first time in weeks, I felt myself smile.
I WAS READY when Rafe came inside with Coulton. They were mid-conversation, Rafe frustrated and Coulton contrite.
“I didn’t know it wouldn’t work before I sliced it off, now did I?” he panted, having raced after Rafe, who’d paid no mind to their disparate states of physical fitness. “And if it had worked, just imagine—”
“Shut up.” Rafe’s voice was very quiet. “Maisie?” He took two slow steps toward where I lay splayed on my cot. “Fuck.”
My eyes were closed, but with some pride I could imagine the scene that they’d walked into: my naked body curled toward the door, bandaged wrist stretched out to rest precisely on the red stain on my mattress, the bandage itself nearly soaked through. The drying vomit on my lips, the blood like war paint smeared across my right cheekbone, the clumps of my tangly hair. And my pièce de résistance, the slow trickle of the sopping, bloody dress I’d torn and hidden in my left hand, squeezing gently, each drop pooling to the floor.
“Fuck. What did you do to her?”
“I told you, just a quick bit off her arm and then—”
“She’s going to need a doctor. Where can we take her? Fuck. Fuck.” I heard the rip of cloth, Rafe tearing up the T-shirt that he wore under his jumpsuit, and felt his gloved hands tie a tourniquet above my sopping bandage. It took all I had in me not to scream from the pain.
“Maybe a military doctor. The military hospital . . . we could say that we just found her. We would have to clean this up. For God’s sake go get the van. Go get her something to wear.”
“Or we could chalk it all up to bad luck. Could be kinder now to let her bleed out. And when her body’s still, we—”
“Go!” Rafe roared. He followed Coulton out, the two huffing up the stairs, leaving the basement door open. I opened an eye—was now the time? Not yet, the chain was on my ankle. But soon.