“I remember the sound of your shoes on the floor down here. Clip-clop, clip-clop. How I would wait for you to come, watching for that little window to light up, for you to pull back the cover and look in at me. How sometimes, you’d bring me candy. And sometimes, you’d give me shocks, shots, put me into the cold tub and leave me there for hours.”
It was all coming back. And the rage was building. Rage not just over what had been done to her, but over what had been done to the others.
“And it wasn’t only me you did this to. It was Iris. It was all the others.”
Gran said nothing, just stood, playing with something in her hand.
What did she have?
A needle full of tranquilizer? Something to manage the monster back into submission? An amnesia drug of some kind?
Forget, Vi. Forget all you’ve learned. Let’s go back to the way things were. Wouldn’t it be easier? Isn’t that the way things are meant to be?
Part of her longed to go back.
“I think,” Gran began, her words slow and calm, “that you’re very shaken up right now, Violet.”
“I read the files. I know what you did. And you can’t do it anymore.”
Gran twirled the object in her fingers.
The lighter. The gold lighter with the engraved butterfly and her initials.
Vi thought of the butterfly, of metamorphosis. Of how once she was a lowly caterpillar, an ugly thing. But now she’d been transformed. She’d crawled out of the chrysalis and unfurled her black, wicked wings.
“If you read the notes, then you know I did you a favor, Violet. I rescued you. I took you away from a doomed life, a dreadful situation. I gave you a second chance.”
Vi shook her head. “You turned me into a monster!”
Gran held up the lighter, flicked it once, twice, three times.
Vi felt her head swimming.
Gran reached for her, wrapped her hand around Vi’s wrist, feeling her pulse. A loving gesture she’d done a thousand times.
“No!” Vi cried, pulling away, scuttling backward. She got behind the bed and held tight to its metal frame, keeping it between them.
Gran flicked the lighter again, began counting down, her voice drawn-out, slow and drippy like molasses. “Ten, nine…” She paused.
“Shut up!” Vi ordered.
“I gave you everything, Violet. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done, my masterpiece. The thing I’m proudest of in all the world.” Gran frowned, then resumed the countdown and flicked the lighter again. “Eight, seven, six, five—”
Vi’s eyelids fluttered.
I am all the gods rolled into one, she told herself. Hypnosis might have worked on the lost girl, Vi, but she was not Vi anymore.
“I. Am. The. Monster,” she said, firmly but not loudly. Her own kind of hypnosis.
And it worked.
She shoved the bed as hard as she could, and it slid, hitting Gran just above the knees. The lighter went skittering across the floor, the butterfly spinning drunkenly. Gran went down with an oof and a clatter, her feet flying up, heels off the ground.
Vi ran to the metal med cart, rummaged through what was left in the medicine drawer.
She snatched a brown glass bottle of chloroform. Moving to the bed, she pulled the clean, starched white case off the plastic pillow and crumpled it up, then dumped some of the bottle’s contents into the center of the folded pillowcase.
Gran was starting to sit up. Vi pushed the bed again, slamming it against her until she went back down.
Vi tracked back through the broken glass, the bits of circuit and wire and metal, and crouched behind Gran’s head. She slapped the pillowcase over Gran’s mouth and held it in place with both hands. Gran stiffened, struggled, so like the rodents she had euthanized over the years. She was screaming, saying something over and over, but the words were muffled. What Vi heard (or thought she heard) was please.
“You did this,” Vi told her. “You made me.”
At last, Gran went limp.
Vi released her, dropped the pillowcase.
Then she dragged her toward the bed.
Gran was small, but Vi was surprised at how easy she was to move. She didn’t even stir when Vi lifted her onto the bed like a sleepy child to be tucked in for the night. Her breathing was slow and soft. She smelled like gin and cigarettes, like clean laundry and Aqua Net hair spray. Like the Jean Naté cologne she always put on after her bath.
Vi slipped Gran’s wrists—so slender, the skin so thin—into the leather restraints attached to the bed, then did her ankles. She’d lost one of her shoes, abandoned on the floor. Next to it was the butterfly lighter.
Vi picked up the lighter. It was still warm from Gran’s hand.
She flicked it, and the flame jumped to life, the familiar smell of lighter fluid filling her nose.
She stepped around the bed. She felt so light she was almost floating, as if she was not even in the room where she’d spent hours, days, weeks, months, years even, chained to that same bed, being made to forget everything she once was, then made to believe she was something entirely new.
Where she was put to death, then brought back to life with a new name. A new identity.
Vi looked at the lighter in her hand, the flame still burning, guiding her like a torch, the butterfly sparkling.
Did the butterfly remember what it meant to be a caterpillar?
Sometimes, Vi thought. Sometimes it did.
That caterpillar was still inside but transformed, now so much greater than itself.
Vi left the room without looking back, shut the door, and turned out the lights.
Lizzy
August 21, 2019
WE WERE NEARLY there now.
I could feel an electric charge, a thrum building as we got closer.
A storm was settling in over the valley. The sky darkened and opened up, heavy drops of rain thumping on the roof of the van.
The air felt thick and heavy.
The inside of the windshield fogged.
I slowed, squinting at the highway. I put on my turn signal and got off at exit 10, where the green and white sign said: FAYEVILLE.
“So you’re saying your sister is Violet Hildreth, Patient S? Like the Patient S?”
I gripped the wheel tightly, eyes darting from the road to the GPS map.
The windshield wipers were slapping back and forth, back and forth, the defroster blasting air to try to clear the glass.
I had spent most of the nearly two-hour drive so far telling Skink about the Inn, about how I was once a girl named Iris, and about Vi and Eric and Gran.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s Patient S.”
“Wow. I read the book, like, a hundred times. And I’ve got a DVD of the movie. I know all about it. What Patient S did—killing her family and everything.”
I shook my head. “You know what Julia wrote. But she left a lot out, and some of what was in there was wrong. Just guesses.”
“But she used Dr. Hildreth’s papers, right?”
“She only had one file. The only one left. The others were all destroyed.”
“How’d she get it?”
“I gave it to her,” I said.
“No way!”
I nodded. “I packed it the night the police took Eric and me from the house.” I looked out the windshield at the rain pouring down in sheets, making it look as if the world itself were melting.
“Wait.” Skink frowned. “So if she’s Patient S, then where did you come from? Did you ever find out?”
“No,” I said. “Anything that might have told me who I was was destroyed.”
I squinted into the rain, eyes on the two lanes of rural highway in front of me. It was getting dark.
I knew we should wait until morning, make a better plan and go in with daylight on our side. I knew we should wait—but if we waited, we might be too late.
“In the movie,” Skink said, “there’s that scene near the end, all those children escaping the rooms in the basement at the Inn. Did that really happen?”
I cringed a little. I’d never been able to make it through the whole movie, but I’d seen enough to know it was a loose interpretation of the truth—a Hollywood version with lots of special effects and pretty girls in makeup playing the patients.
“No. Violet and I were the only two kids in the Inn that night. It was just us.”
Skink was quiet for a while. He had The Book of Monsters balanced on his lap and was looking through it as we drove.
I kept my eyes on the road, slowed when I came to a sharp curve.
Skink, lit by the reading light, was tapping his fingers on the book. “What does she mean when she says she ‘transforms’ the girls?” he asked.