The Women in the Walls (14 page)

“Your mother, Eva, is in here, too, you know,” Margaret says, her tone low and even. Her words make my heart skip a beat, make me stop crying immediately, make my breath catch in my chest. “And she isn't very happy with you.”

“That's not true, sweetie,” another voice chimes in, terribly equal amounts of familiar and unfamiliar, and my hand flies to cover my mouth. “I just miss you so very much and it's taking you too long.”

My mother is trapped in the walls, too, and even more tears come. I wish I could say that her voice brings me comfort, fills that massive gap that exploded into existence once Penelope and Margaret were gone, but all I can feel is despair, more so now that I realize she may have been watching me grow up, seeing who it is that I've turned out to be, what I've ended up doing to myself. Some daughter, even to a ghost.

“Too long to what?” I manage to ask.

“To either save us or join us,” my mother says. There come a series of insect-like clicks and hisses from behind the tile all of a sudden, the sounds of gasps and splintering bone.
“Join us.”

Without trying to speak to them anymore, I lean away from the wall and put the razor back into the basket, then stand, nearly jumping out of my skin when I step on a waxy bath oil bead that explodes with a sharp pop. Without cleaning the mess up, I open the scarlet shower curtain and step out, my stomach in my throat, terrified that any second some invisible force is going to slam me against the bathroom tiles and peel my skin off strip by strip or something worse.

But nothing happens, nothing stops me from leaving the bathroom, and no more voices await me in my bedroom. Regardless, I pull my bed away from the wall and leave it, exposed, in the center of the room. Sitting straight up, I stare into my fireplace, unblinking, my arms wrapped around myself as I wonder about things like madness and murder and just what can possibly come from swallowing a bunch of teeth.

I END UP
skipping out on sleep altogether, which may not be the greatest choice, but then again, it isn't much of a choice at all. Every time I come close, I'll hear some sort of sound—a winded tree branch scraping against the glass, a popping ember from the fireplace, the sighs of the house settling—and be certain that it was Margaret or my mother.

I can't decide if they want to protect me or hurt me. Margaret stopped me from using the razor on myself, but my mother begged for me to join them. How else would I join them without dying? I remember how Margaret mentioned that there was some sort of way to free her. I'm doing all of this for her. She deserves for me to either figure it out or die trying.

Maybe I'll end up joining them, after all.

By the time my father comes to get his food for breakfast, I'm already dressed and waiting at the dining room table.

“I'm ready to see Penelope,” I say as soon as he walks into the dining room, despite the grim expression on his face. “She's had the night to rest.”

“Fine.” My father's hair is not combed sideways with gel; he is not wearing a suit. “You can try to see her whenever you want, and the nurse can be the one to tell you if it is or isn't a good time.”

“There's a nurse here?” I ask, thrown off. “From the hospital in town?”

“Privately funded,” my father says. Of course. “Penelope didn't want to go to the hospital. She keeps saying she only wants to stay home, and after what she's been through, I don't blame her.”

“Something's happened to her.” I stand from the table and suddenly realize that I'm still wearing yesterday's clothes. “She's not the same.”

“She will be.” My father pours his coffee and turns to lean against the table. “She'll come back to us as she readjusts, little by little, and then maybe she'll let us know what exactly she's been through, and how she survived all this time.”

“I wonder what Gregory Shaw and Kent Dickens will think,” I say, hoping to gauge some sort of reaction from him. “Do you think they'll be happy or sad?”

My father stiffens. “I'm starting to become worried about you. You don't look well at all. I'm starting to wonder if Margaret's death has had an especially ill effect on you. Perhaps some extended rest will—”

“I don't need to rest,” I snap as I walk past him, out of the dining room and into the parlor. “I need to speak with my aunt.”

Once at her door, I knock hesitantly, unsure if I'm ready for whatever is about to happen. Will Penelope be happy to see me, or will it make her upset? Will she help me stop the living nightmare, or will she drag me deeper into it? What will she say when I tell her I know about the teeth and the rituals and the Mother? What will she say when I ask her if she's purposefully trapped the souls of Margaret and my mother in the walls?

Before I can wonder any more, a tall man in a brown houndstooth suit answers the door. In his hand is a syringe.

“Yes?” he says, as though he has no idea who I might be. Surely my father mentioned that he had a daughter who lived here.

“I'm here to see my aunt,” I say. “I'm Lucy.”

“Oh, Lucy,” the man says, looking thoughtful as he steps to the side to let me in. “Your name has come up quite a few times in Ms. Acosta's ramblings, so it's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance. My name is Howard.”

“You don't look like a nurse.” I eye the empty syringe still clutched in his hand. “Aren't you supposed to be wearing scrubs or gloves or something? And what's that for?”

“I just had to sedate her,” Howard says, dropping the syringe into a plastic biohazard container, ignoring my other comments. I step inside and look to my aunt's bed, almost hesitantly. Sure enough, there she is, lying against the pillows, her mouth slightly open as she sleeps. I wonder why she needed to be sedated.

I don't know what I expected, maybe some obscene display of evil or insanity or God knows what else, but seeing her now for the first time in weeks only makes me think of old times, when she was so loving and protective of me, like I was a second daughter. No matter what it is she's been caught up in, there's no way she would ever really hurt me.

The question now is if she hurt other people, like Walter, and Margaret, and my mother.

“Penelope,” I whisper, and her eyes stay closed. I rush to her side before I even know what I'm doing, sitting at the bedside chair and taking her hand in mine.
I don't have to take much more of this; she's here and it's all going to be over now...
“You're really back.”

My mouth pulls into a hard frown as I take in my aunt's appearance close-up. Her hair is filthy, saturated in oil and dirt, and the tangles look like they'll take days to get through. Besides that, it's also thinned noticeably, and there are strange sores scattered randomly over her skin. Her lips are spiderwebbed with cracks.

“Is she sick?” I ask.

“A little,” Howard says, his deep voice calm and smooth. “The lacerations were probably made herself, with her fingernails or something from outside. The cuts just got a little infected, is all. The fever will stay down eventually, with my help. She was also suffering from extreme exhaustion—it's as though she hadn't slept for days. It made her extremely paranoid. The sedation will help with that immensely. After she's had a solid sleep, she'll be much more like herself.”

I look at Penelope's face, willing her to open her eyes and tell me everything, but she remains still.

“Has she been outside all this time?” I think of the forest, and the cold weather, and all the rain we've been having. “How did she survive?”

“I don't understand it,” Howard says, sitting in a different chair and staring at Penelope with a wary eye. “She's clearly been through
something
, but it's not consistent with someone who's been unsheltered this entire time. There's no hypothermia or any other of the more severe symptoms of extended cold exposure, but she wasn't wearing any shoes when she came back in. The bottoms of her feet were affected by walking bare over the terrain of the forest, but just barely.”

Penelope's hand is hot and clammy in mine. I imagine her barefoot in the forest, saying nonsense chant words and dancing through the trees in the midnight snow, and my chest becomes heavy with dread.

“It's almost as if she was confined somewhere,” the nurse in the houndstooth suit continues. “Perhaps she was staying in an abandoned mine or cave or something of the like.”

I think of the white marble tomb in the woods, so stark among the trees, and my heart skips a beat. Did the ritual require her to somehow get inside the
tomb
? I imagine Penelope lying silently inside when I ran my hands over the marble, looking for an inscription when Margaret and I found the cemetery, and my hands start to tingle.

But as I get up and pull my hand from Penelope's, her eyes flicker open and she looks up at me. “You,” she says, her words thick and slow from the sedation. “My niece.”

“That's right.” I sit back down immediately, leaning close. I take her hand again, smiling softly while I look into her eyes, telling myself over and over not to be scared of her. “Hey there, Penelope, welcome back. I missed you more than you could ever know.”

“She should be sleeping,” Howard says from behind me. I hear him fumbling with something in his bag—likely more sedation drugs. I have to hurry.

“I'm not there anymore,” Penelope rasps, taking in a ragged breath of air. “In the darkness.”

I stiffen in my seat.

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” Howard says when he sees my reaction. “The medicine I gave her is strong. She just needs a slightly increased dose so we can at least get eight hours of sleep into her. Talking nonsense is completely normal.”

“What darkness?” I ask my aunt as he preps the injection, ignoring his words. “Why were you in the darkness, Penelope?” I want to ask specifics about the ritual stuff but can't in front of whoever this Howard person is. I don't know who he is, but if he's privately funded, he could be connected to the country club somehow, and therefore cannot be trusted.

“Best not to indulge that sort of behavior,” he says, sounding confused. “Just keep talking to her as though she never said it. Reassure her that she's fine.”

“She's not fine,” I snap at the nurse, who looks at me like I've grown a second head. I turn back to my aunt, who is gaping up at me with wide, terrified eyes.

“I did something bad,” she whispers. “I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay,” I say back, even though I'm pretty sure it's not okay. “There has to be a way to turn it all around, right?”

The nurse raises an eyebrow, and I wish more than anything that he would go away.

“Maybe,” she moans, her eyes desperate. Her speech is running together; the sedation drugs are pulling her back into sleep without even having to receive the second dose. The nurse nods to himself, content, and replaces the cap on the injection needle.

My aunt lowers her voice to a whisper—I lean in close so that Howard won't hear. “It's because the grounds are so sacred,” she says. “It never could have happened otherwise.”

From the time that I was little, Penelope would refer to the estate as sacred. Clearly, she meant it literally. But how did it become that way? Was it always that way, or was something done to make it sacred? Suddenly I'm overcome with the urge to discover everything I can about the origins of the estate itself, from before it was in my family.

“Rest now,” I assure her, which Howard must approve of, because he finally sits back in his chair. She won't be able to help me while she's this drugged, and at least now I've finally got something productive I can do in all of this. “We can talk when you're a little more awake.”

A tiny glimmer of hope shimmers cruelly away inside. My aunt is asleep before I've finished rising from my chair.

“I'll come back later,” I say, and Howard nods. “Please make sure I'm told when she's awake again, and not so drugged up.”

“Of course,” he assures me. “We'll get her there, eventually.”

Hopefully by then I'll know more about what is happening in this house.

I leave my aunt's bedroom and head up the stairs to the second floor, passing the bedrooms and curving around to the other side of the house, where the library is. I haven't been in here since I promised myself I'd stop staring out the window, wishing for Penelope to come back. And I thought things were bad then.

The floor-to-ceiling windows that make up the back wall of the library are covered by enormous curtains, filling the room with shadows. I make my way to them, intending to open them wide so I can see what I'm doing, but then I notice the dull glow of a reading light in the corner of the room. I make my way over, passing the shelves until I see who is sitting in the dark, reading: Vanessa.

At first my mind goes wild, trying to find ways to get her out of here—she can't know what I'm doing! But then I realize, if I'm able to talk her into helping me look around for stuff on the estate, I'll maybe be able to find what I'm looking for twice as fast, two brains and all that. At this point, I need all the help I can get. And it wouldn't be endangering her, right? Pulling her into a bigger picture that she's not even aware exists? It's only simple research about the house, I decide in the end.

She'll be fine.