Sisters of Sorrow (9 page)

Anna jogged again. The whistle had been at a distance, but it meant the sisters had resumed their search. They would be organized now, searching in careful patterns, with the light of day on their side. She needed to reach the safety Joseph had promised, and she needed to reach it soon.

She now ran through a younger section of forest. The trees were short and thin trunked. The underbrush grew thick, with tangles of blackberry vines claiming large clearings. Anna’s path lay in a straight line rather than the random turns and gradual curves it followed earlier in the day. Stubs of rotted posts poked out of the ground at regular intervals, perhaps a dilapidated fence line. Joseph had said she would find him at an abandoned farm…

As you near the fallen farmhouse, listen for the creek of the rusted windmill. Make your way toward the sound. As you near it, find the mass of thick brambles. Crawl inside. The thorns will prick you and cut you, but pay them no mind. Abbess McCain will not look for you here.

I can do that,
she thought.
I
must be getting close
.

The trees gave way to tall, windswept grass. Anna’s trail crested a short hill. As she reached the top, she gasped in amazement and fell to her knees. The Pacific Ocean stretched all the way from one side of the horizon to the other, sparkling brilliant blue under a nearly cloudless sky. She had never seen anything like it.

She might have knelt there, staring out at the sea, for the rest of the day, if not for the sounds. A whistle blew, off to her right. Tall grass and a copse of thin alders stood between her and the whistle. She hadn’t been seen, but the sisters were very close. She guessed that they were working south along the coast. From her vantage, she had seen the southern end of the island. The nuns would reach it in less than an hour.

Would they then continue around the island on the beach, or would they make their way back to the orphanage through the woods? Anna didn’t know. She did know that
somebody
would search the woods, whether it was this group of sisters or another. They may be in the woods already.

As she crouched in the grass considering this, she became aware of another sound, a metallic
clank
. The sound was still a ways off, but it was clear.
Clank
, several seconds of quiet, then
clank.
Anna rose to a crouch and ran, keeping low, toward the noise. Eventually, another noise joined the
clank
, a high-pitched
screee
. Each
screee
started as an imperceptible whine that would grow louder and louder until the
clank
silenced it. Then, the cycle began again.

That must be the windmill
.

The trail dropped into a low, overgrown pasture, then topped another rise. Anna saw the ocean again, but this time, she also saw a little steamer, probably the same one she had seen moored to Saint Frances’s dock six days ago. The boat cruised slowly south, close to the beach.

Anna ducked and scuttled in a half crawl toward the metallic noise. It sounded very close. The trail dipped again and Anna rose to her full height. The head of the windmill appeared above the tall grass. It stood at the crest of the next rise.
ScreeeeeeeClank… ScreeeeeeeeClank…

A few yards to the west of the windmill, between it and the west-facing beach, the heap of brambles piled out of a clearing. It was twice as tall as a man, nearly the size of a house.

She ran up the trail to the base of the windmill. From the windmill to the south beach stretched a pasture of short grass. A curve of sand wrapped around the grassland where the south beach became the west beach. The screen of alders still stood between her and the search party to the west, but if they turned inland, she would be standing in plain sight. She sprinted for the brambles.

A rectangle of old bricks surrounded the massive heap of blackberry vines. It had been a house, long ago. Either fire or storm or simple time had taken the wooden structure, leaving only the foundation behind.

Anna searched around the foundation for a way into the tangled thorns and vines. A distant whistle sounded. Anna sighed with relief. It was farther away than she had imagined the search party to be. Then, she realized the whistle had come out of the east, from a second party. The east whistle was answered by a whistle from the west, a very
close
whistle from the west.

A rabbit darted through the grass, nearly hopping right into Anna. It danced away from her at the last minute with a fancy, zigzag hop. Then, it bounced into an opening in the briars. Anna followed.

The rabbit had been plump, and Anna was orphan thin, but it was still a very tight fit. Thorns snagged Anna’s coat and shawl, they hooked into the skin on her wrists and neck. The barbs lining the floor of the warren dug into her knees and palms. Above her, vines wove an impenetrable canopy, creating false night within the mass of brambles.

This is worse than the drainage pipe. This tunnel has teeth!

Another whistle cried. She couldn’t tell from which direction, but it sounded close. She crawled deeper into the thorns. Something twitched just ahead of her. The rabbit poked its head out of a nook, eyed her with unconcealed astonishment, then disappeared down a hole in the ground.

Yes
,
I am as crazy as I look.

Anna dragged herself toward the rabbit’s hole, now flat on her belly, thorns digging into her scalp and palms and legs. Ancient dust and pollen drifted down out of the canopy. She was shaking vines that hadn’t been disturbed in years. When she reached the rabbit hole, it was too small for even her head to enter.

He didn’t say go down a rabbit hole, dummy,
she scolded herself
, he said lift the iron ring. He said…

Take care as you crawl, as you approach the entrance. Feel around under the brambles. Feel for the crumbling wooden planks. Do not crawl across them. They will not support even one as small as you. Run your fingers along the edge of the wood. Mind the splinters. You will find an iron ring. Lift it. Lift it only enough to slip inside. Lower yourself through the hole. Test each step before your weight is on it, the bottom is a long way down. It is very dark, but don’t worry, they will never find you here.

She searched the ground around her but did not discover any planks.
What if this is the wrong thicket?
she thought. But this had to be right. This was exactly where Joseph said it would be
.

Unless he is just using you,
said the other voice.
Maybe he wanted you to blow up the factory and then lead the sisters on a chase so that he could sneak into the orphanage while they are away.

That is stupid
, she thought
. People try to sneak out of Saint Frances. Nobody sneaks
in
.

Sister Dolores did.

Shut up,
she thought and dragged herself further into the brambles
. He wanted me. Specifically me. He knew my name.

Nun’s voices carried on the breeze, too far away to be understood, but still way too close. Anna rummaged under the bed of leaves and dead bramble branches, finding no planks.

Her tunnel had narrowed to an end and she could go no further. She attempted to squirm backward, intending to try a different path, but as she did so, the vines and branches collapsed in on her. She struggled backward, but the harder she pushed, the tighter the brambles held her, the deeper the thorns bit her
.

You are in the jaws of the briar monster and it has begun to chew
, the other voice said in her head.

Shut up
, she screamed back.

Anna’s arms ached with effort. Her eyes watered from the dust and her skin stung everywhere from countless punctures and scrapes. She let her head flop forward onto her arms, discovering that her neck ached as well. Come to think of it, her feet, ankles and knees felt used up, too. And she was so tired.
Maybe I’ll just sleep here for a little bit
, she thought.

Then she coughed.

The first cough snuck up on her. She hadn’t expected it, but now an entire herd of coughs were lining up for their chance to rat her out. The dust and pollen settled over her, thicker than the morning’s mist. Anna choked down one cough and stifled a second into her hands.

She didn’t hear any chatter from the search party. Had they moved away from her, or had they quieted to listen? Anna imagined them looking at each other, silent, asking with their eyes, “Did you hear that?” “Was that a cough?” “It was just a chipmunk or blue jay.” “Sounded like a little girl coughing, to me.”

She squinted into the darkness. Thick vines blocked the path ahead and to the left. A gap opened to the right, too narrow for her whole body, but wide enough to slip her arm through. She reached over, trying to feel for the boards beneath the leaves.

But, as her hand passed through the opening, she felt nothing. Nothing at all. Under the groundcover was nothing but thin air.

That’s it
! she thought. The vines clutched her tightly, much too tightly for any little girl to tear free of their grasp, but Anna did it anyway. The thorns punctured, then scraped, then deeply cut into her skin, but she pushed through. Turning onto her side, folding to an L shape, she coiled into the narrow gap.

As she pushed herself through, the thorns broke off in her skin, and her progress became easier. Her hips slid most of the way through the gap. She balanced on a ledge of some sort at the edge of the hole.

Anna looked around, trying to define the edges of the pit, trying to locate the iron ring. Darkness and dust hid any details. The ground below her was hard and regular, like wood. She lowered her arm, past her elbow, into the hole, but felt nothing below.

The whistle cried again, at a distance, followed by an answering whistle even farther off.
The search parties are moving away
, she thought, and coughed quietly into her hand.

A closer sound drew her attention, a snapping noise below her, then a slow crackling. The ledge on which she lay sagged, slumping toward the pit. Anna stifled a scream and flailed for a handhold. Brittle blackberry vines snapped off in her grasp. Her ledge collapsed, dropping Anna headfirst into the darkness. Her lower legs, still in the clutches of the briar monster, hung up at the crumbling edge of the pit.

She dangled upside down for a moment, too startled and frazzled to think. Then the vines released her. She plummeted. Half a scream escaped her lips before she crashed onto the middle step of a moldering staircase. Rotten wood crumbled under her weight. The entire staircase crashed into the pit with Anna. There was a crack and a flash inside her skull. She stopped thinking then, stopped knowing. When night fell, hours later, Anna still had not stirred.

Anna dreamed. She dreamed of the day she had arrived at the orphanage. A flat blanket of cloud hung low in the sky. Heavy mist fought light drizzle for ownership of the air. Anna sat at the front of the boat watching The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum emerge from the haze, its single tower rising like an enormous headstone.

Then, it
was
a headstone, in her dream – her brother’s headstone.

Here lies Ephraim Dufresne

1902 – 1904

Drowned in a bathtub

By his big sister

Beside it stood her mother’s headstone.

Here lies Maria Dufresne

1881 – 1904

Opened her veins

In the tub that took her son
Her father didn’t have a headstone. He hadn’t died.

Anna’s grave was unmarked. It was just a pit covered with rotting timbers and wild, ravenous blackberry vines. She saw herself lying at the bottom, legs and arms splayed in all directions, covered in mud and cuts. The ruins of the collapsed staircase littered the floor around her. Something heavy, perhaps a piece of lumber, lay across her chest.

Anna reached into the grave to lift the heavy thing from her chest. The other Anna grabbed her hand and said, “Leave it. That’s not for you.”

“I want to get it off my chest.”

“Do you?” asked the other Anna in the other Anna voice. “Then look at it!”

Suddenly, she did not want to look at it. She didn’t want anything to do with it or with the other Anna. She tried to run, but the other Anna refused to let her go.

“Look at it,” the other Anna repeated.

She tried not to look, but, as happens in dreams, her head and her eyes ignored her desires. The thing on the other Anna’s chest was a door. She recognized the door from a familiar place, long ago. Her hand, of its own accord, took hold of the knob and turned. The door opened. Anna and the other Anna stepped through.

The mirror above the sink reflected two Annas, standing side by side. One was groomed and dressed according to the manner to which she had been born. The other wore a mud crusted drape of unidentifiable cut, her hair, nails, teeth unkempt. She bled from countless scratches.

Tiny six-sided tiles covered the floor and the first three feet of the walls, mainly white, but with a few blue tiles scattered about. Water dripped idly in the sink. Dust motes loitered in a shaft of late morning sunlight that fell through the window. Anna looked at everything except the bathtub.

“You have to look,” said the other Anna.

“I already know what is in there.”

“You already know, but you do not see.”

“I don’t
want
to see.”

“Yes you do,” said the clean Anna in the mirror.

The bathtub moved toward the Annas, walking on its claw feet.

She couldn’t run. She couldn’t turn away.

The tub stopped when its rim rested against her thighs. The water lay flat and smooth, undisturbed. Beneath its glassy surface, on the bottom, lay her brother – eyes open, lips parted, pale hair adrift, still dressed in his nightshirt. A slab of concrete lay across his body, holding him under.

“Did you do that?” the other Anna asked.

“I don’t…”

“You can’t lie to me, Anna.” The other Anna’s eyes did the Sister Dolores thing, shifting black to violet to blue again.

“You’re not a witch,” Anna said.

“How do you know?”

Anna said nothing.

“Don’t lie anymore, Anna. Look.”

The tub took another step, shoving her back.

Anna looked at her little brother. He looked back at her. He was talking, under there, talking in his inquisitive, content little voice, though no sounds came forth.

“Did you do that?” the other Anna demanded.

“No,” she admitted.

“Then who did?”

Anna whipped her head around and stared wide eyed at the other her. “I… I can’t say.”

“Where are you supposed to be right now, Anna?”

“I’m supposed to be at school, but I got sent home for punching Harry Resnick.”

“You punched Harry because he said your mother was crazy. Is your mother home right now?”

Anna eyed the other Anna warily. In the tub, little Ephraim reached playful fingers up at her.

“If I say momma did it, they’ll take her away and lock her up forever,” she whispered.

“Did she do it?”

Anna looked into the bathtub. Ephraim was gone. It now cradled her mother’s body. The water had turned nearly black with blood.

“She did it, didn’t she, Anna?”

Tears streamed over her cheeks. She looked at her other self and nodded.

The dreams flowed on, the way dreams do, but the bathtub, and what she saw there, were what she remembered when she opened her eyes.

Her first thought upon waking was that she was in the bathtub, under the slab of concrete. She lay in a few inches of water. Something heavy had fallen across her. Water dripped nearby. She moved a little, but found it was much more comfortable to remain still.

She thought about Ephraim and her mother. She thought about the house where they had lived. How different all that had been, how naïve she had been about the world.

“I didn’t kill him,” she whispered into the darkness. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my little brother.” Then, when the darkness failed to answer, she said, “My mother killed him.”

Overhead, flecks of moonlight winked through small openings in the canopy. Anna could see nothing of her surroundings. The pit smelled like mold and rotten seaweed and dead things.

I don’t want to be down another dark hole.
I want to see the sun and the ocean. I want to smell the forest.

The night dragged on. Irritable sea birds called now and then. The coyotes yipped and howled nearby. The windmill
screeeeee
clank’
d relentlessly. Rabbits scurried through the brambles, marveling at the hole Anna had made in their warren. Somewhere close, water dripped. And dripped. And dripped.

Anna drifted in and out of troubled sleep. Dreams faded into reality faded into dreamless oblivion. She didn’t know or care which was which. Her mind and her two voices murmured inarticulate arguments about innocence and guilt and the ramifications thereof.

Had I told the truth, maybe my mother wouldn’t have died.

But they would have locked her up.

Maybe papa wouldn’t have run off if she was still alive.

And maybe they would have hanged her
.

The debate dribbled on and on like the slow, insistent trickle of water, weaving through her dreams and waking.

Then, a new voice, “You have something for me?” It was the dream whisper she had heard in the drainage tunnel.

“I have a potato,” Anna murmured, “but it’s raw.”

“Your finger,” the Joseph voice said. “You brought me your finger.”

“It’s here,” she murmured, “but it’s too heavy.” She lifted her hand out of the water and brought it to her chest. A sloshing sound echoed through the pit, like a wet mop slopping onto a floor. The splashing sounds drew nearer. She could see a form moving toward her. It was either kneeling or very short.

A snake-like appendage slid out of the black, wrapping around the object on Anna’s chest. She realized that a wooden beam – not the concrete slab from the bathtub, not her severed finger - had been pinning her to the floor. The snake, or tentacle or whatever it was, hoisted the beam off her chest and dropped it into the shallow water just beyond her. She realized how hard it had been to breathe, how much easier it had become to fill her lungs with its weight gone.

“Let me have it.” The voice alternated between a whisper and a child’s voice. A hand reached toward her out of the darkness.

She drew the finger from under her dress. It twitched against her palm. She held it out to the dark form. “I don’t want it anymore,” she said.

The hand plucked the pinky from her, snatching it from its leather thong. She saw the hand clearly now, either by dreamtime magic or a trick of moonlight. The hand was more bone than flesh. The flesh still clinging to it was mottled and sagging. Three of the fingers were missing entirely, having been replaced by two octopus tentacles and a crab leg. The arm which extended the patchwork hand was not a human arm, but in the intense gloom, Anna couldn’t make out any details.

Its eyes floated above the other end of the inhuman arm, like twin yellow moons veiled by a scrim of coal smoke. The form behind the eyes appeared shapeless, just a huddled mass, dark and wet, as if it were wrapped in shiny brown seaweed. It loomed over her, watching, contemplating her for several minutes. Anna wished to either wake up or fall asleep, whichever would banish the creature.

The thing turned away from her, slosh-clomping into the further recesses of the pit. A sickly, wan light rose out of a hole in the floor. The thing with her finger hobbled to the hole and crawled headfirst over its edge, disappearing into whatever lay below. As it went, Anna saw its leg, a pale leg wearing bite marks from a coyote, and a nun’s black shoe.