The voice was quiet but clear and pure. It could almost have been a sound set ringing by the air itself, like a glass flute in the wind.
“What’s…missing…from…this…picture.”
The intonation was perfectly level. I could hear that there was no question mark.
Terrified, I tried to force my eyes open, but found myself fighting a heavy resistance that felt almost like paralysis. Still, I could have sworn that, for a split second, I saw the same gothic lettering on the sloping ceiling above my bed, but this time in a ghostly green, like glow-in-the-dark ink. What’s missing from this picture.
Now I jump-started fully awake, prickling with cold heat. Pandemos, who had snuck in earlier and curled up on top of my duvet, hissed and spat, leaving a pattern of claw marks on my arm as she struggled to get away. I leapt to my feet and yelled out loud to the darkness: “I know what’s missing! She’s gone! She’s gone!” I sobbed as I gasped for breath. “What am I supposed to do about it?”
The sound of my own voice was now the most terrifying thing, coming out of nowhere, out of no one, splitting the room down the middle. We say we are afraid of ghosts and crazy people, but really we are afraid of ourselves. Our real selves. Horror movie settings in ascending order of creepiness: a haunted house, a psych ward, a hall of mirrors.
I ran to flick on the main lights, so antiseptically bright that they killed all the night’s illusions in an instant. The familiar walls returned. There was no voice downstairs. No writing on my ceiling. I looked down at my notebooks in despair, and as I settled into awakeness the rigid terror melted and morphed into white anger. The anger was suddenly overwhelming: a shapeshifter, a nightmare, an ever-expanding ogre that I would never escape.
“Stupid…little…girl,” I hissed at myself, grabbing armfuls of notebooks off the desk and shoving as many as would fit into the wastepaper bin. I slammed the bin down outside my door—leaving one’s bin outside was an established signal meaning that the bedders should not come in to clean your room—throwing the rest of the notebooks in messy heaps on the floor all around it. Pandemos, who had recovered her calm much better than I, stalked out of the open door as if nothing had happened.
I dragged the door closed, cried myself back to sleep, and slept for three days. I even missed two lectures. I never missed classes. But this was the only response I could think of. To say: fuck off. To what? Myself? Cambridge? The universe?
What is this, a multiple-choice test? All of the above.
I can’t starve it out of me, I tried. And I can’t kill it. I could have killed myself, if they had let me. But it would come after me anyway. Death’s nothing. Things keep going. People keep going.
Part Three Doughnuts
But when I came, alas! to wive
Chapter Nine
Time scabbed over my sliced thigh, which healed up like Pandemos’s claw marks. I got up again and went to lectures. What else was there to do?
The notebooks found their way back to me. My bedder had carefully gathered them from in and around my bin, the morning after I threw them out, and—assuming they were there by accident—kindly placed them in a tidy pile outside my door before taking away the rest of the rubbish. That’s where I found them, when I resurrected myself on the fourth day. I sobbed with relief to have them again, although it was at the same time a heavy burden to accept. I knew that I would never be able to make another attempt to get rid of them.
I stashed as many as would fit in my desk drawers, and I made the overflow into three small stacks underneath the desk. At least that way they were off the surface and I could use it for work during the day.
And I did. Nothing acts faster than Anadin. My aunt loved saying that, and she would always add, with a giggle, so why not take nothing? But it turns out symbolic logic exercises are some of the best painkillers. Or all-nighter essays on immense metaphysical questions like why anything exists at all, why there shouldn’t have been nothing. That kind of thinking utterly numbs you. Removes distractions. Feelings. Holmes understood: All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. But you have to replace them with something. I didn’t believe in the possibility of nothing. Not as a genuine alternative. Not for me. It’s an illusion that some people find comforting. I find it terrifying. Nothing will come of nothing. I’d hear that with my eyes closed, and an angry old white man would threaten me, shaking his impotent fist. (How long has he been there?)
Nothing does nothing to help Deb. That was the point. I needed to stay clear-headed, so I could find her. Of course, I didn’t put any of this in my essays. I told nobody. In fact I barely spoke at all until the next meeting of The Eleven, when the polite young man who’d initiated me into the Society gave a careful but insipid presentation on the anthropology of ghost stories in Northern England, and the four of us who were present clapped kindly and asked him safe, encouraging questions. Then I went back to my silent life again.
I don’t know how long I might have gone on like this, if it hadn’t been for The Cop. Until I met her, I couldn’t admit to myself how desperately I needed someone. Someone who could help me get back up. Correct my dreadful swerve. Set me on a path that actually went somewhere.
