THE NOISE FROM downstairs reached the end of the hall. I lay flat on my stomach under the bed. If I lifted my chin from the floor, grazed my scalp against the box-spring, I saw Leopold’s cherubic pucker in an old beach photograph, arm wrapped possessively around who I assumed, from the freckles and the bright curling hair, to be Candy.
I burrowed my head in my arms.
The footsteps were not swift like Dorian’s. They lacked an ease of navigation, as if lost. Nor were they Candy’s soft, nervous tiptoe. Accompanying them was a harrowing thud. I could not reach for the necklace, Dorian had slipped it away again. I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from crying small sounds of terror. So much dust, and clumps of hair, and dead insects crumbling into black spots on the floor. I tried to breathe through my collar but a waft of debris flew to the back of my throat and soon I was coughing in a noisy fit, my head thrown back painfully into the bottom of the box-spring.
The footsteps halted. I had sounded an alarm. They turned quickly and started for the scarlet bedroom, pausing on the other side of its door. The knob shook until it dropped, loose in its socket. There came a hefty thwack through the centre of the wood. Metal gleamed through the widening gap; it hit with a force so blunt and swift that I thought my bones were cracking open. I watched from under the bed as the door peeled away, and the rusty axe from the shed in Dorian’s yard made its way through the splitting planks.
A shadow shifted back and forth in the hacked-out gaps. All of the room’s colours flooded together.
“Bonnie?”
The knob swung unhinged with the keyhole a dented mess on the floor.
I dug my face into the cradle of my elbow. “Don’t touch me!”
The shadow dropped the axe and grabbed me, its sharp nails digging with a familiar pang.
“Get up,” it said.
I clawed through the shadow’s hair like I meant to tear it out. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
“Stop it, Bonnie!” The shadow fought with me, dragging me out from under the bed until it started coughing sparks. “Bonnie — Bonnie, please just — stop it, you need — will you shut up for two fucking seconds, what do you mean it isn’t me?”
A figment of Fritzi, who could not have been Fritzi, panted on her knees. She was pulling me out by the elbow, coughing into my hair. Her eyes looked crazed, glassy red and fractured like she was listening to something soundless in the air. “Do you hear anyone?” she asked. “Are there people here aside from Mr. Fields?”
I crawled out from under the bed. She paled at the stain on my skirt and grabbed me by the jaw.
“Bonnie — baby, what did he do to you?”
I did not understand her. “Leeches,” I said.
Her grip was too tight and I tried to shake out of it, but she only held on harder. “What does that mean, leeches? What do you mean by that?”
I touched my skirt. “He put leeches on me.”
Her voice carried a curl of revulsion. “Why would he do that?” she asked, not me but quietly under her breath, over and over, as she checked my arms and legs.
She smelled of lemongrass like the kitchen soap at home, and stale cigarette. “You smell like my sister.”
“I know, baby. We have to go, though. Okay?”
I let the shadowy figment help me up off the floor.
“Hold my hand,” she said, coughing into her shoulder.
I grabbed her whole arm.
“Can you walk?” Light slap to my jaw. “Bonnie, can you walk?”
“Are we going home?”
“Yes,” she said, “but we need to move quickly. Can you do that for me? Careful, watch your step.”
The long stairwell dropped below us, and the musty windows burned with light.
At the bottom of the stairs, the figment stopped.
“Sit here,” she said.
“Are you leaving me?”
“No, baby, I’m just going to get something. Stay put.”
“Don’t.” I reached out and grabbed the pocket of her jeans.
“Bonnie, please. Will you stay? If I go outside for just a moment, will you stay right here? You won’t move?”
I looked to either side of us in the large foyer. An open door with its hasp chipped off led into the kitchen, where a shattered window peered out onto the orange grove. The figment of Fritzi hurried toward it, barreling into the backdoor. She twisted the knob and stared bewildered when it did not open. She wrestled with it for a moment longer before crawling onto the kitchen table, pausing only to catch her balance. She lowered herself one leg at a time through a hole in the window so small that her ribs grazed the craggy glass along the edges. She was gone several minutes before returning with a rusted jug like a giant tea kettle.
“What’s that?” I asked. My head was clearing, a cool water pouring cleanly over the fog.
“I saw it in the shed when I grabbed the axe,” she said, with a dreamlike matter-of-factness, as if no other logic could be needed. She pinched my chin between her fingers and examined my eyes. “What did he give you? Did he say?”
I shook my head. “I’m all right. I think I’m all right.”
“Doesn’t matter what you think. What did it look like?”
“It was white. In a capsule.”
“But you don’t feel sick?”
“A little foggy now,” I said. I pointed to the jug, recognizing it from the shed, shoved in the corner with yard tools and a cobra-coiled hose. “What are we doing with that?”
Fritzi wrapped one arm around my waist and picked up the large tin jug with the other. It smelled like the exhaust pipe at the back of our Coupe. I thought to ask her what we needed with gasoline, but with a start I saw where she was leading us. The hidden door to the greenhouse was propped open, held in place by a yawning lion statuette.
“We can’t go in there,” I said. My heels dug against the floor. “Fritzi.”
“Don’t scream. You don’t have to go in.”
A malodorous waft rolled over us from the gaping greenhouse. “Mr. Fields goes in there, Fritzi, I saw him.”
“Trust me, it’ll be all right.”
I pulled her arm with any drained hysteria left. “Don’t go,” I kept saying, lowering my weight to drag her down.
She remained calm and squeezed my hand. Her eyes were the soft blue of butane flames. “He’s not going to hurt us. Look at me — Bonnie, look at me. I need to hear you say it. You won’t follow after me.”
I was too confused to argue further. “I won’t follow.”
When my sister reached the greenhouse door, she looked at me from across the hall, tiny in her cocoon jacket, with her wild inkblot of hair. A breeze crept in from a high, unreachable window, and carried with it the smoky pink of early sunrise.