“Close the door,” comes the figure’s squeaky, light voice.
I turn slowly, weighing up whether to scream, but my thoughts must be obvious, because the same voice says:
“One sound and I slit her throat.”
It’s calm and direct, with a hint of a bite. Like the sun shining through the clouds.
I shut the door, which closes with a small click.
“Are there more of you?” she asks when I turn back to them.
I swallow, unable to find my voice.
“Just us,” I say eventually.
“You and the other one downstairs?”
The flicker of hope I’d harbored that she didn’t know about Robert dies. I nod.
She stands still, apparently thinking. I hardly dare look at her, so afraid I am of what she might do to Tone. Instead I look at Tone, desperately searching her eyes, trying to find some trace of her in there.
I just want someone to tell me what to do.
Then I hear footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Alice,” I hear Robert call. “Are you ready?”
The woman in front of me presses the knife even harder to Tone’s neck.
I hear the door open behind me.
“I couldn’t find a water bottle, but I…”
He goes quiet.
NOW
All I can hear are Tone’s shallow, panting breaths.
“Good,” the woman says, and I hear something of a perverse approval in her voice. “Very good.”
When she looks up, her tangle of hair falls to the side to reveal a face like carved bark, something frozen and contorted. Sun-damaged skin lying in folds over blunted features; thin lips cut by deep wrinkles flapping over yellow teeth; and, in the middle of it all, a pair of glinting, deep-set gold-brown eyes.
It isn’t hard to put a word to what blazes in her eyes.
It isn’t fear or worry; it’s excitement. An intoxicating, radiant excitement that makes her hand tremble.
“You,” she says, nodding at me. “Bind his hands.”
That girlishly shrill voice again; that same rounding off of her words.
I clear my throat, afraid that my voice won’t carry.
“I have nothing to tie him with,” I say, trying to sound as calm as possible, keeping my voice even so as not to scare or anger her.
“There’s a rope on the bed,” she says, sounding almost amused.
And yes, there it is, I see, as I slowly lower my eyes. It looks old and worn.
I bend over cautiously and pick it up. The fibers scratch at my hands.
“Good,” she squeaks. “Now. Bind his hands.”
She moistens her lips with her dry, pointed tongue.
I turn to look at Robert. His eyes meet mine. Paradoxical as it is, he looks calmer now than he did in the church, as though he’s regained his composure in the eye of the storm.
When I turn back around, I see it isn’t me she’s looking at, but Tone. She flashes her stained teeth in something resembling a smile.
“You thought you’d do it this time, didn’t you?” she asks, and it’s as though Robert and I aren’t even here. “You thought you’d be free to spread your poison now, that there’d be no one left to stop you. But I’m still here. Oh, yes, I’m here.”
She makes a crackling, broken sound that must be a laugh.
“I could tell who you were, even from far away. I knew you’d returned. Did you enjoy my song? Remember it? It was the hymn you died to, witch. I wanted to remind you.”
The entire world is balanced on her knife-edge.
She twists her head so that her eyes land on me. Slightly more of her face is exposed now, giving me a clearer view of her. Her nose must have once been fine and chiseled, but now seems to sink down into her slack skin. Her eyelashes are short and thin. And she has a birthmark under one eye—dark, oddly elegant, like the painted-on beauty spot on an old beauty.
“It’s time,” she says. “This ends tonight.” Her eyes pin me down as she tugs at Tone’s hair, tautening her neck against the blade.
“You’ll give them back to me, you hear? I know it was you,” she hisses in Tone’s ear. “Do you hear them singing? They’re waiting for me. They’re going to come back to me. I’ll take you there, and then you’re going to give them back. You whore.” She spits out the last word, and it sounds unnatural, like how a child would say it—someone testing the waters, trying it on for size.
Does it dawn on me slowly, or is it those oddly childish words that peel away the years? The features start to fall into place: that intense stare; some familial likeness in the way the years have flattened and eroded the bones beneath her thin skin; something that reminds me of Grandma’s sagging, thin lips after her stroke.
Or maybe it’s just the birthmark. Maybe that’s what makes the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place.
“Aina?” I say.
NOW
Aina’s eyes rivet me to the spot. I think I see something like surprise on her face, but it vanishes just as quickly as it appeared.
“You’re infected,” she mutters to herself, then she repeats it, drawing out the syllables: “In-fec-ted.”
What we’re supposedly infected with I don’t know, but I assume it’s nothing good.
I gulp. The muscles in my throat feel sore and strained.
“I’m Margareta’s granddaughter,” I say. “Margareta is my grandma.”
She licks her lips again, almost compulsively.
“Margareta?” she repeats.
“Your big sister,” I whisper.
She seems to go still, and for a second I think I’ve reached her.
But then she clenches her jaw and bares her teeth. Her heavy eyebrows pull together, the furrow between them forming a fissure down her face.
“She left me here,” she says, with a whininess that soon turns to fury. “She left me here! She abandoned me. I wrote to her, but she never came.”
The last part is a scratchy whisper that ends as a sigh.
“I’m here,” I say. “I came here. To find you.”
There
