The Night Sister (21 page)

Rose bit her tongue hard, teeth clamping down until tears came to her eyes. She nodded. Yes. She understood. She was entirely on her own. She'd get no help from Mama or anyone else.

Mama led the way back up the driveway to the house. When Rose looked up, she saw Sylvie standing in front of their bedroom window, watching her and Mama with a worried scowl.

Alfred Hitchcock

Universal Studios

Hollywood, California

September 19, 1961

Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

Father had to put down Lucy the cow. We were born on the same day, Lucy and I. Lucy was born with a black spot in the exact shape of the state of Vermont. People used to come from all over just to see her, to take her picture. My father always said that Lucy's birth was a sign, a lucky sign that good things were in store for our family. So what does her death mean? Even more bad luck, I suppose.

My uncle Fenton is gone and it's all my fault. I am a terrible person. A monster. You would be shocked if I confessed the things I have done.

I'm sorry to burden you with all of this, it's just that I have no one else to turn to. I feel I will burst inside if I don't tell someone the truth—someone who might just understand that every one of us has evil inside them. Every one.

Sincerely yours,

Miss Sylvia A. Slater

The Tower Motel

328 Route 6

London, Vermont

It was now the first week of October; two weeks since Fenton had disappeared. Rose had been watching Sylvie and getting ready. She had strained to remember everything Oma had told her. The more she thought about it, the clearer it was that her grandmother had known about Sylvie, that she had been trying to prepare Rose.

“Is there a way to stop a mare, Oma?” Rose asked once when they were together in the woods.

Oma nodded. “Yes, but it is not easy. A mare is a dangerous creature, Rose, and very, very clever.” She reached out and brushed away the bangs that had been covering Rose's eyes.

“But there's a way?”

“If you bind a mare in iron, whether it is in human or animal form, it will be unable to transform.”

“Iron?” Rose asked. “You mean chains?”

“Chains, leg irons, a cage perhaps. There is a story I have heard about a bear kept by King Henry at the Tower of London.”

“The real Tower of London?” Rose asked.

Oma smiled. “Yes. The
real
Tower of London. The story goes that the bear was actually the king's mare lover—only when he released her from her leg irons at night could she return to her human form.”

“Do you think it's true?” Rose asked.

Oma considered a moment, and popped a horehound candy into her mouth before she answered. “I think it is a story. Like all stories, it has pieces which are true, and pieces which are fiction. Nothing is ever really what it seems. Remember that, Rose.”

Rose had found her father's old canvas army backpack in the garage and filled it with the supplies she thought she might need: a length of iron chain, a rusted trap her daddy had used to trap foxes when he was a boy, her butterfly net, the biggest kitchen knife, and a silver Ray-O-Vac flashlight.

The bag was terrifically heavy, the contents rattling and jabbing into her back. She'd sneaked out of bed while Sylvie was still sleeping and gone to the workshop to find the packed bag just where she'd stashed it under the bench, behind a large can of gasoline. She'd put on her darkest clothes—a pair of navy dungarees, a black turtleneck—an outfit to help her blend into the night.

Now she stood in the open doorway and waited, watching the house. It didn't matter if Sylvie didn't come tonight. Rose would wait. She'd come back tomorrow night, the night after as well. She'd wait as long as she needed, hiding in the shadows, ready to do whatever it took.

It didn't take long.

Just an hour or so after Rose got outside, Sylvie slipped out the front door, with her robe wrapped around her and pink slippers on her feet. She looked right, toward the workshop and Rose, then left, down the driveway, toward the motel and tower. She seemed to hesitate in the doorway, then finally pushed off and hurried down the driveway at a near run as her robe flapped behind. She was headed straight for the tower.

Come get me,
she seemed to say.
I dare you.

“It's now or never,” Rose said, hearing the Elvis song in her head.

Tomorrow will be too late….

She moved slowly, carefully, sticking to the shadows, careful not to jostle the contents in the bag, because they would clang.

She didn't have much of a plan. Just get to the tower. Find Sylvie. Wait for her to transform. Capture her.

Somehow, she'd chain the Sylvie monster. Get Mama. Make her believe.

Rose stood with her back against the tower, the backpack weighing achingly on her shoulders. She listened at the doorway.

“Sylvie?” she called.

“What is it you want from me?” her sister asked, a voice from the shadows.

“Want from you?” Rose shrugged the backpack off as carefully and quietly as she could. Her head began to ache, a slow and steady throb like a pulse in her forehead, spreading to her left eye.

“Why haven't you told?” Sylvie asked.

Rose squinted, trying to quiet the sudden, stabbing pain. She tried to concentrate on getting Sylvie to transform. What would it take? Perhaps if she felt threatened.

“No one would believe me if I did,” Rose said. “You're the good girl. You always have been. No one would believe me if I told them what you really were.”

Rose could hear her sister begin to cry, softly at first, then louder.

“What
am I
? What am I, Rose?”

“A monster.” It felt so good to say it out loud. “And you've fooled everyone but me. I know what you did to Fenton.”

“Fenton,” Sylvie said, sobbing now.

Rose pulled the flashlight out of the bag but stayed where she was, just outside the tower door, waiting for her moment.

“It was his doing as much as mine,” Sylvie said, sniffling. “It was wrong, I know, but he's gone now, so it won't happen again.”

“No,” Rose said, stepping forward, swinging her body around so that she stood in the open doorway. “It won't happen again. Because I'm going to stop you.”

She flipped on the flashlight, steeling herself against what she might see: her sister in hideous insect form with six legs, wings, a shiny exoskeleton. But there was just a girl in a robe with pink slippers on her feet. Her face was red and splotchy, her hair sticking up everywhere in a very non-Sylvie way.

Rose took a step into the tower, keeping the beam of her flashlight pointed at Sylvie's face. The determination on Rose's face must have scared Sylvie, because all of a sudden she grew wary.

“Rose, you just stay away from me,” Sylvie warned, moving now, inching sideways toward the ladder. “If you don't, I'll tell Mama.”

“I won't let you do it again,” Rose said flatly. “I won't let you hurt anyone else.”

Rose's head was throbbing now, the pain bright and blinding. The beam from the flashlight seemed to pulsate, making her sister's face waver, almost as if she weren't really there at all. Rose's skin prickled, felt hot and itchy.

Sylvie ran for the ladder and started to climb.

Rose ducked back outside, grabbed the backpack, and followed her sister up the ladder, the flashlight tucked in the back waistband of her pants, her sweaty hands sticking to the wooden rungs. The ladder felt like it was moving. But it wasn't just the ladder. It was the whole tower: each stone and board was pulsating, throbbing in time with the pain in her head.

When she surfaced on the second floor, Rose ran the beam of light in a circle. No Sylvie. Only the round walls, and moonlight streaming in through the slit-shaped windows.

She had to hurry now. She couldn't let Sylvie get away.

If Sylvie transformed, she might just fly away, wings beating, head with mandibles swiveling, free forever.

Heart and brain pounding, Rose labored up the second ladder, leading to the roof. Her arms and legs were heavy and stiff, like they didn't belong to her. The wind picked up, sending a chill through her. She reached the top and shone the flashlight around, the beam bouncing off the walls with their battlements.

There was her sister, still in human form, standing close to the low wall. The moonlight had turned everything a bright, sparkling blue. The scene before her pulsated along with the throbbing in her head.

“I'm going away,” Sylvie said. She was no longer crying. She spoke defiantly and dramatically. “I'm going far away, and I'm never going to come back. I'm leaving tonight. Just go back to the house, Rose. Pretend you never saw me and I'll be gone by morning, and you'll never see me again.”

“No,” Rose said, stepping toward her sister. “I can't let you do that. I know how dangerous you are.”

“You don't know anything! You're crazy.” Sylvie laughed raggedly, though her eyes looked frightened. “Stay away,” she said again.

She backed toward the wall. Rose ran for her, and was on her in an instant, seizing her arm.

“For God's sake, Rose! Let go!” Sylvie cried, frantically trying to snatch her arm away. But Rose held firm.

They spun, stumbling, scratching each other. Rose grabbed Sylvie's hair and jerked her head forward, half expecting to see a terrible mouth hidden on the back of her sister's head. Sylvie shrieked, dug her nails into Rose's arm, and raked them down, leaving trails of blood. They twirled together, stumbling like drunk dancers doing their own version of the twist. The stars above them blurred. Everything took on a sickening yellowish tinge. Rose staggered, her legs suddenly not working right. Sylvie's nails felt as if they were clawing their way down to the bone. Rose dipped forward and sank her teeth into her sister's forearm until she tasted blood. Sylvie cried out and released her grip. The terrible dance slowed. Sylvie looked, unbelieving, from the wound on her arm to Rose's face.

“My God,” Sylvie breathed. Her face was white; her lips were colorless; her eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. “What's
happening
to you?” She pulled back from Rose with all her strength.

Sylvie slipped from Rose's grasp. Rose fell to the floor. Sylvie, suddenly free, stumbled back two steps and hit the wall hard. It caught her at the waist, and she was gone, over the edge, flipping over backward in a clumsy dive.

“Sylvie!” Rose screamed, only it came out as a strangled-sounding growl. She tried to get up, but found her body was frozen, her muscles unable to respond to her mind's command to move, her head swimming, the pain in her head pulsing. She lay there for what felt like ages, while strength returned to her limbs and her vision cleared a little.

At last, in slow motion, she was able to stagger over to the edge. She willed herself to look down, to search the pool of darkness at the bottom for her sister's crumpled body. But there was nothing—only the cold shadow of the tower.

“Sylvie!” Rose called, her voice hoarse and strained, searching the darkness. Surely her sister couldn't have walked away from the fall—it was a good thirty feet down.

But where was she?

Gone. Sylvie was gone.

“No,” Rose moaned. She sank down to her knees, head hurting so bad she was sure that something inside was going to explode.

Then, at the edge of her vision, she caught movement: a quick fluttering, the slight glow of nearly iridescent wings.

And there she was: Sylvie, in luna-moth form, rising from the darkness below, coming to rest on top of the stone wall. With her pale-green wings spread wide, she was beautiful, luminous, glittering, as though made of stardust.

Slowly, Rose felt for the pack, which had fallen off during their struggle, reached inside, and pulled out the butterfly net. She stood up and crept forward slowly, net behind her back.

“Got you!” she cried, slamming the net down on top of her sister.

She held the butterfly net closed carefully as she climbed back down to the base of the tower. In the kitchen, she used her flashlight to find the large glass jar that her mother sometimes made sauerkraut in. She put the moth inside and screwed the lid on tight. Then she took the jar out to the shed, found a roll of baling wire, and wrapped it over and over around the jar, making a metal cage, so that it would be impossible for her to transform back into a human.

Once she was back in her bedroom, Rose placed the wire-wrapped jar on the floor beside her bed.

“I've got you,” she said again to the moth in the jar. It was clinging to the inside of the glass and seemed to make no move to find a means of escape. The moth was perfectly still, as if she knew she'd been caught at last. Maybe she even wanted to be. Maybe it was time to surrender.