He came to as though from ages of sleep. “What…?” he said. “Where…?”
“Dinner’s ready,” Linda said, and reality dawned on him.
“Will you fix your dad a drink?” he asked as he stretched and gathered his strength, though Linda knew her mother would fix his plate for him and place it right into his lap, no movement on his part required.
Linda dug around in the cooler and found his vodka arranged with Linda’s juice boxes, her mother’s whiskey, mint leaves, seltzer for the mint juleps she drank on weekends, and several cans of Mountain Dew for Linda’s sister. Linda grabbed a red Solo cup from the baggie beside the cooler. She poured in a fair amount of vodka with half a can of Mountain Dew, then she crushed several mint leaves in her hand and dropped those in the drink as well. The sun had set, and Linda’s deeds were covered by night, her mother’s fussing over her father’s dinner, and her father’s loud complaining about how sick he felt from a day of sun and hiking. Linda dumped in as many poison ivy leaves as she could get away with, then rubbed the inside part of the baggie against the rim of the cup.
“I made up a cocktail,” she said as she presented the drink to her father.
Linda’s mother paused in her meal and looked at Linda and her father, a frown forming on her face.
“Well, look at that!” Her father took the Solo cup from Linda’s hands. “My own little bartender!” He laughed. Linda’s mother chuckled. Linda’s sister said nothing. “Like father, like daughter!” And he took his first sip of the drink.
Linda watched for his reaction. He turned up his lip at the taste, but he tried not to show his disgust with her creation.
“What do you call this drink, Lin?” he said.
“Mountain Mystery,” she said.
“I think you’ve got a solid future in beverage concoction,” he said, and he drained the cup and handed it back to her. “Mind if I just have a standard vodka on the rocks this time, bartender? No offense to your special creation.”
Linda nodded and fixed her father a vodka and ice. He drained it, too, and the drinks just kept on coming.
In the middle of nowhere, in a ghost town, in the haunted manor, Linda found herself contending once more with dead and dying bodies. In the grass lay Deja, her skin shredded with the mark of Marion’s claws, her breath a wisp. At the edge of the wood lay Marion in her final charred form. And in her own arms lay the woman Linda had come to love.
Deja had asked Linda to kill her, to open an uninhabited tree and to sew Deja inside. Linda had done it once, ended a life. She had poisoned her father to save her mother, to save her sister, to save herself. Self-preservation was a quality all living things possessed. Even Deja, now begging Linda to not kill her. To preserve her. Indefinitely. To help her become something else. To save Linda and Charity. But Linda had learned a lesson in her young age: sometimes, when you saved someone, you lost them.
Linda’s mother’s meds hadn’t been a question of money. Her father’s life insurance policy had paid out, after all, and Linda’s mother had enough supply to last her for a long while. It was a question of serving someone. Linda’s mother had aimed, her whole life, to serve Linda’s father. To serve a man. To be a mother was in service of his being a father. To be a woman was in service of his needs, his wants. And Linda’s mother couldn’t transition from a need to serve her husband to a need to serve her children. She hadn’t been trained her whole life for that. She stopped taking her medicine, and neither child understood that it wasn’t their duty to force her. They tried bringing it to her each morning, slipping it into her food. She stopped eating, as though she could smell their attempts nestled in thick slices of bread or melted in chicken noodle soup warmed from a can.
Their mother descended into a black hole, and soon, she refused even to leave her bed. The kids missed school. The state came calling. They hauled Linda’s mother away and placed the children in foster care. Linda’s sister lasted a week before she fled with one of the foster boys, never to return. The foster family blamed Linda for the loss of two of their children, and the money they could claim to host them, and the trouble that rained down on them for not being able to keep them from running.
Linda had tried to save someone, and instead, she dug herself deeper into the grave of her misfortune. Now, to save Charity, she once more had to commit a terrible act.
Linda laughed at the way it sounded. To think it made her feel mad. But she didn’t feel like her adolescent self had felt. The same desperation hummed in her, but now she needed to complete the monstrous act, to become the wicked creature, to save a love that flowed both ways, not to create that love from nothing.
Deja explained how her journals showed every step of the ritual and every word that need be spoken. The simple ritual required a kind hand, a soft song, and a few specific actions.
Seeing Deja perform part of it had helped. Linda recalled, with the same picture-perfect accuracy she displayed when recalling her father’s face, the way Deja had taken a blade and pricked the cameraman’s naked body from head to toe, bringing out tiny drops of blood that shone in the shifting light like little bulbs on a Christmas tree.
Linda grabbed Deja’s feet and dragged her through the woods until she reached a clearing. As she dropped her, Deja moaned, her eyes fluttering with near-death.
“I’m close to going,” she whispered, her voice scratched and deep like the gashes in her neck. “I’m on my way.”
Linda breathed. She closed her eyes, recalling the tune of the song Deja had hummed. Pulling it forth, she let it dance across her tongue as she placed a palm against each tree. One hummed back. She lay her cheek against the bark, an apology of skin on what would become skin.
Then, she pried the bark away, tossing each piece to the ground until she exposed an area large enough to fit a folded-up person. With her blade, she hacked the naked wood. Her forearms ached with each nick. She hummed until her throat was sore. She tried her best to ignore Deja’s dying moans, but they wormed into her, and the buzz that floated from her mouth dripped with pain. Finally, the tree spread itself with a hiss, and Linda gasped as she gazed at its eager inner core.
Clinging to her knife, Linda knelt beside Deja. She started at her feet. She skirted around the copious wounds, coaxing dots of blood to the surface.
“I wonder what I’ll be like,” Deja whispered.
“What do you mean?” Linda reached Deja’s naked belly.
“The Williams weren’t always like this, you know. They became the monsters people said they were.”
When Linda poked into Deja’s breastbone, Deja didn’t flinch.
“And here you are, doing it again,” Deja said. “Becoming the monster.”
Linda stopped. She frowned. Once, she would have agreed with Deja. She would have prostrated herself on the altar of evil. Now, she shook her head. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the green gleam of poison ivy. “You asked me to do this.” And she ripped the plant from the ground and stuffed it into Deja’s mouth, muffling her words. “You’ve said enough. No more guilt.”
With that, she grasped Deja by the neck and pierced twenty holes in her face as she sputtered, trying to spit out the ivy. Linda hoisted the woman over her shoulder. Breathing hard, she carried her to the tree and thrust her inside as Deja’s attempts to speak faded into guttural moans. Deja folded her arms across her chest, resigned to the fate that had always awaited her.
“Ready?” Linda said, but she didn’t wait for a reply before pushing closed the gash. The wood fibers grabbed at one another, and Linda sewed shut the wound, moving each stitch through with all the effort that remained.
When she finished, the tree shuddered as the bark transformed.
“Do good by us,” Linda said. “Or else, we’re dead as you.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Linda
The food supplies were thin. Linda cursed Deja even as she heard the once-producer groaning outside the windows, doing her best to manage the movements of the woods the way she had managed her contestants’ actions.
The day the crew was to arrive was still two days away.
Early in the morning, Linda trekked out to check the road and found it blocked, with no sign of Sabrina’s escape, save a trampled path down the mountainside that might have been her friend—or a mountain lion. Linda worried that their two days would extend into a week or more. Maybe help would never come.
