Raise her up from the filth and squalor, reshape her.
I looked at this child with her dark eyes, body too skinny from poor nutrition, and I knew she would truly be a pilgrim of a sort. A traveler entering new and sacred lands.
But first, as with any true pilgrim, she would need to leave her old world behind. To sever all ties to her previous life.
I began to formulate a plan and, in time, to implement it.
Fortunately, the girl proved very easy to influence. I began an intensive regimen of programming and hypnotic suggestion.
* * *
IT WAS A fire that killed them. Not technically the fire itself, but smoke inhalation.
D.P. and his wife were too soaked in cheap vodka to wake. The older girl was in her room, most likely too high or drunk herself to know what was happening.
Patient S—the little girl with a book of matches in her pocket and kerosene-stained hands—was never found.
No one looked for her very hard. Not the police or social services.
I was interviewed, of course, because I was on record as having had contact with the family.
I told them that it was my understanding that the younger girl had been sent off to live with a distant relative. A cousin, perhaps? Somewhere out of state—regrettably, I had no more information.
Next came the real challenge of the Mayflower Project: to take this girl who had come from nothing, this girl who had done terrible things—and to wipe her clean. To have her begin again as an empty vessel ready to fill.
Vi
July 20, 1978
VI AND IRIS were alone in Vi’s room after dinner—Iris was quiet, glassy-eyed. She sat on her bed on the floor, staring out at nothing. Vi knew that look—Gran had given Iris medicine to help keep her calm after her “episode” at the fire last night.
It was all Vi’s fault. If she hadn’t come up with the stupid plan and asked Iris to fake going nuts and lead Gran off on a chase through the woods, then Iris wouldn’t be all tranqed up. And Eric wouldn’t be shut up in his room, sulking, after Gran yelled and yelled at him for setting the fire in the first place. “Idiotic,” she’d said. “Honestly, Eric, I’m disappointed in you.”
Vi had told both of them that she hadn’t been able to get into the basement—that the key hadn’t worked. She hadn’t been able to face telling either of them the truth. She’d been living with the secret all day, felt it coiled inside her like a poisonous snake.
She looked out the window. She could see the lights of the Inn glowing. The air was damp and the beams of light made a ghostly halo around the building. Gran had said she wouldn’t be back until late. They were short-staffed and a patient was in crisis. Vi was glad to see Gran go. Half of her still loved Gran desperately, and the other half hated her with a ferocity she hadn’t realized she was capable of. She’d never felt so tangled up.
This was someone she’d known her whole life, who had taught her to read, had nurtured her ambitions to be a doctor, who’d fed her and bathed her and put cool cloths on her head when she was sick, who sang her a lullaby each night. Yet somehow, she was the same woman who’d written those notes, who’d done those horrible things to Iris and all the others.
Iris was obviously Patient S. That meant there had been at least eighteen patients in the Mayflower Project before her. Thinking about it made Vi feel sick and dizzy. She thought of Old Mac—how he always wore a hat, was completely devoted to Gran. But what had happened to all of the others?
“You okay?” she asked Iris for what must have been the hundredth time. She walked over, sat down on the mattress beside her.
“Yeah,” Iris said. “Just sleepy.” She laid her head back on the pillow. The dingy rabbit puppet was beside her. She slept with it every night.
“I think it’s important,” Vi said, “that you not take the pills Gran gives you.”
With effort, Iris sat up again. She looked at Vi with a puzzled expression, but said nothing.
“Just fake it,” Vi explained. “Keep the pill in your cheek—and when she’s not looking, spit it out.”
For the first time in her life that she could remember, Vi hadn’t drunk the special milkshake Gran made for her that morning. She took pretend sips while Gran was watching; then, when she left the kitchen, Vi had dumped it down the drain.
She didn’t think there was anything in there besides wheat germ and raw egg, milk and ice cream, but she didn’t trust Gran. Not anymore.
“Why shouldn’t I take them?” Iris asked now, blinking like a tired owl. “Gran says the medicine helps. It’s to help make me better. Make me remember.”
“What if it’s not?” Vi said.
“Huh?”
Vi picked at a loose string on Iris’s quilt. “What if I told you that it’s not. That Gran isn’t who she seems.”
If she told, there was no going back.
But she had to tell.
She pulled hard on the loose thread, and part of the quilt’s edging began to unravel.
Iris blinked again. “Well, who is she, then?”
“I’ve got a better question,” Vi said, standing up.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Who are you?”
“Me?”
Vi’s mouth went dry. She began to pace, going back and forth across the painted floorboards of her room. “Last night, when I went to the Inn, I got down into the basement, into B West.”
Iris stared at her. “But you said you couldn’t—that the key didn’t work.”
Vi swallowed hard, shook her head. “I just didn’t know how to tell you the truth. I got in and I found things out. Like I promised I would.”
It had been a terrible promise to make. A terrible promise to keep. Vi had been wondering all day if she should tell Iris the truth. She’d gone back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum swinging.
She thought of the movie The Pit and the Pendulum. About the man strapped to the table and the pendulum swinging back and forth, getting lower down with each swing, a huge razor-sharp blade on the end.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Like her pacing now.
Maybe Iris was better off not knowing. Ignorance was bliss, wasn’t it?
But then Vi thought of her promise. Promises meant something. Besides, if it were her, she would want to know. She would want to know the truth, no matter what.
Some secrets were too big to keep.
She had to tell.
She had to tell Iris. And she had to tell other people, too.
She had to find a way to stop Gran.
There went the snake, writhing in her belly.
“Tell me,” Iris said. She looked more awake now. And more than a little scared.
“Are you sure you want to know?” Vi asked.
Iris nodded.
Vi walked over to her desk, looked out the window above it at the lights of the Inn across the yard. Where was her grandmother? Down in the basement, in B West? Was there a new patient strapped down in one of those rooms?
She had to do this. She knew it. She had to tell people the truth. And she needed to start with Iris.
Vi flipped on her desk lamp, then went back to her bed, pulled the folder of notes she had taken from the Inn from under her mattress.
“You need to read this,” she said.
She knew she should be the one to say it, to explain what she had learned. But she felt sick when she thought of having to actually tell Iris the story.
So she laid the folder out on her desk. “Just read,” she said.
Vi sat on her bed and chewed her nails while she watched Iris work through the papers slowly. Her finger moved along beneath the words, tapping the pages.
Her eyes were glassy, expressionless.
The seconds ticked by. Soon an hour had passed.
Vi sat still, watching Iris read. She wanted to speak, to break the room’s silence, but there was nothing to say.
But what she wanted most was to step back through time, to not have gone down into the basement. To not have discovered any of this. To not be sharing the truth with Iris right now. She wanted to go back to the time when they were just sisters hunting monsters, never realizing how close the real monsters truly were.
* * *