Her mind was clearing – not much, but just enough. She wanted to live. She wanted Grady to live. But if they didn’t, if the woman was lying, then she wanted revenge: for her, for her brother, for Ernie and Teddy, for everyone this woman and that terrible child had ever hurt. The detective would find them. He would find them, and he would punish them.
‘Nobody,’ she repeated. ‘I swear it.’
Grady screamed again, but she closed her eyes and her ears to it.
I’m sorry, she thought, but you shouldn’t have told. You just shouldn’t have told.
Deep darkness without, and darkness within, illuminated only by a lamp on the small table beneath the mirror.
Grady was moaning softly. The boy had sliced vertically through his lips with the boxcutter blade, but they had stopped bleeding, at least for as long as Grady could keep from moving his mouth. They were still alive, though, and Darina Flores had eventually stopped her questions. They had ceased when Marielle had come up with one detail, one small half-remembered piece of information from her father’s final days. A fort: her father had mentioned passing a fort as they returned home with the money. She hadn’t told the detective about it because she hadn’t trusted him enough, not then. Now she wished that she’d told him all as she watched Darina use a laptop to check maps and histories in an effort to confirm the truth of what she had just heard.
Marielle must have slept for a time. She couldn’t remember the main lights in the room being turned off, or a blanket being laid over her to keep her warm. She was having trouble breathing. She tried to alter her position, but it didn’t help. The boy was staring at her. His pale, washed-out features repelled her, his thinning hair and his swollen throat. He looked like an old man shrunk to the size of a child. She’d dreamed of him, she realized, and the memory of it made her feel ashamed. In the dream, the boy had been trying to kiss her. No, it was not quite a kiss: his mouth had fixed upon hers like a lamprey attaching itself to prey, and he had begun sucking, pulling the breath from her lungs, drawing the life from her, but he hadn’t managed to do it because she was still here, still breathing, however poorly.
Just a dream, but as she thought that she felt the tenderness of her lips, and there was a foul taste in her mouth, as though she had eaten a piece of meat that was past its best.
The boy smiled at her, and she began to retch drily.
‘Get her some water,’ said Darina, but she did not look up from the screen.
The boy went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water. She was reluctant to accept it, hated having him anywhere near her, but better some brief proximity to him than to reject the water and keep that taste in her mouth, so she drank, and the water dribbled down her chin and fell coldly upon her chest. At last, when she could drink no more, she pulled her head back. The boy removed the glass from her lips but remained standing over her, watching.
Marielle’s back ached. She shifted on the couch so that she was sitting upright. A blinking red light caught her eye, hidden before by the table. It was a red number ‘1’ blinking on the telephone answering machine. She remembered the earlier call, and the voice that had sounded so familiar.
It had been the detective’s voice.
She turned her head away too quickly. The boy frowned. He looked over his shoulder.
‘More water,’ said Marielle. ‘Please.’
‘Do as she asks,’ said Darina. ‘Give her more water.’
But the boy ignored them both. He put the glass on the dining room table and approached the answering machine. He put his head to one side, like an animal faced with an unfamiliar object. One pale finger reached out and hovered uncertainly above the ‘play’ button.
‘Please!’ said Marielle again.
Darina glanced up from her screen.
‘What are you doing?’ she said to the boy. ‘This work is important. If she wants more water, then give her more water. Just shut her up!’
The boy stepped away from the machine. He lowered his hand.
Marielle sank back against the arm of the sofa. She drew in an inadequate, shuddering breath, and closed her eyes.
There was a single beep from the other end of the room, and a voice began to speak, deep and male.
‘Hi, Marielle, this is Charlie Parker. I just wanted to let you know—’
The rest of the message was lost in a scream of rage and pain unlike any that Marielle had heard before, made more awful by the fact that it came from a child. The boy screamed a second time. His back arched, his neck straining so far back that it seemed as though his spine must break or the swelling on his throat erupt in a shower of blood and pus. Darina rose to her feet, the laptop falling to the floor, and even over the screaming Marielle could hear the voice of the detective telling her that he was coming up to talk with her, that he just had one or two more questions to ask her and Ernie.
There was a buzzing in the room. Even Grady, immersed in his own misery, heard it. His head moved, trying to find the source of the sound. The house grew colder, as though someone had opened a door, but the air that came through was not filled with the smell of trees and grass but with smoke.
An insect flew across Marielle’s line of sight. She shrank away from it instinctively, but it came back, buzzing a foot from her face. Even in the dim light, she could see the wasp’s yellow and black striped body, and the curve of its venomous abdomen. She hated wasps, especially those that lived this late into the year. She drew up her knees to her chest and tried to use her feet to flip the blanket at it, but now there was a second insect, and a third. The room began to fill with them, and even in her fear she could not understand how. There were no nests nearby, and how could so many have survived?
Still the boy screamed, and suddenly Grady was screaming too, his voice joining with that of the boy, and her brother’s bisected lips burst with the effort, and the sound of pain was added to his fright, for Grady’s had been a cry of fear at first.
The mirror: the wasps were pouring out of the mirror. It had ceased to be a reflective surface, or so it appeared to Marielle, and had instead been transformed into a framed hole in the wall. The dying wasps, once trapped behind it, were now free.
But that was a supporting wall. It was solid concrete, not hollow, and the mirror was just a mirror. Nothing could pass through it. It was simply glass.
She felt a wasp land on her cheek and begin crawling toward her eye. She shook her head and blew at it. It buzzed away angrily, then returned. Its stinger brushed her skin, and she prepared for the pain, but it did not come. The wasp departed, and the others went with it, the little swarm returning to the mirror where they buzzed and roiled in a circular motion, forming a cloud that took on the dimensions of a head with two dark waspless holes for eyes, and another larger slit for a mouth, a face of wasps that stared out at them from the mirror, and its rage was the wasps’ rage, and it vented its fury through them.
The wasp mouth moved, forming words that Marielle could not hear, and the boy’s screams ceased. Darina clasped him to her, the back of his head against her breasts, and he shuddered in her embrace.
Grady, too, stopped screaming. The only sound in the room was the boy’s sobbing breaths, and the buzzing from the mirror.
Darina kissed the top of the boy’s head, and laid her cheek on his pale scalp. Her eyes found Marielle staring at her, and Marielle could see that Darina was both smiling and crying.
‘He remembers,’ said Darina. ‘He’s back now. He’s mine again. My Brightwell. But you shouldn’t have lied. You shouldn’t have told us lies.’
The boy stepped away from her. He wiped his eyes, and walked to the mirror. He stood before the face of wasps, and he spoke to it in a language that Marielle did not recognize, and it spoke back to him. He stayed that way until the buzzing stopped, and one by one the wasps began to fall to the floor where they crawled sluggishly for a time before dying, leaving only the boy staring at his own reflection.
Grady Vetters had curled in upon himself. He was weeping and shaking, and Marielle knew that something had snapped inside him. When she called his name he did not look at her, and his eyes were those of a stranger.
‘He has so many forms,’ said Darina to Marielle, ‘so many names.’ She was pointing to the mirror. ‘He Who Waits Behind The Glass, The Upside-Down Man, The God of Wasps . . .’
The boy found a sheet of paper in his bag. On one side was a drawing of a truck, but the other side was
