ONE OF THE pots boils over, brown foam flowing forth like volcanic spume and crackling when it hits the flame below. Karalee runs to it and turns down the gas. The kitchen smells of burning food.
Chick and Estela each sprawl out on the dust-coated floor, lethargic. “Where is the woman?” Chick moans. “She’s disappeared again.”
“I thought you weren’t hungry,” Karalee says.
“I’m not, but she owes us an accounting. She poisoned us, made us sick.”
“Oh, you only exhausted yourself with that outburst in the boathouse.”
“And Estela?”
“Maybe she caught a bug. If the woman poisoned us, how come I’m not sick?”
“I wish I knew.”
He struggles to his feet in the darkness, Karalee feeling him more than she sees him, and lunges forward and twists all the stove burners to a high flame for light. Now Karalee sees the strands of hair plastered to his forehead by sweat, the stubble on his chin grown scruffy and oily. He rakes his gaze over the cans arrayed on the stainless steel counter. “The ingredients for peach melba—or close enough. You know whose weapon that was.”
It did in fact dawn on her minutes ago, and she just as quickly drove it from her mind. “That happened a long time ago,” she says dismissively. “A very long time ago.”
“Soper identified it as the vector. Although in those days, she used fresh peaches, and I gather these are canned.” His jaw drops. His gaze darts around the room. “My God. That woman who’s been feeding us really is the killer Typhoid Mary.”
“That’s impossible and you know it,” Karalee protests.
His eyes widen. “She’s Typhoid Mary and you’re defending her.”
“Doubly impossible.”
“Impossible, yet everything points to it. The name—she told us herself she was Mary. Her slipup with the mention of Briehof. Her cooking skills—everyone always admitted that Mary could cook. And this is North Brother, after all, where she was last seen alive.”
“Correction,” Karalee says. “Where she was last seen dead.”
“Well, I can’t explain it, but the rest fits. Don’t you agree, Estela?”
Estela looks half asleep, but she’s been tracking the conversation. “It’s suspicious,” she says. “But she’s the wrong age.”
“How do you know? She’s filthy,” Chick presses. “We can never get a good look at her face.”
“She’s not a hundred and thirteen under that grime,” Karalee scoffs. Her mind turns over the possibilities. “She could be an imitator,” she admits.
“I have another theory,” Chick says, warming to his argument. “There’s no evidence Mary—the original Mary—ever suffered from typhoid fever, and yet she carried the live bacteria. She was resistant … immune. That woman—you saw her. She’s a fucking bull. Whatever makes her immune to typhoid could make her immune to other things, maybe even to the accumulated insults of aging. She’s Super Woman, but she’s not one of the good guys. She’s a virago.”
“A what?” Estela asks.
“A violent woman with a mean streak. You get my drift? And she’s targeted us because … because—” He holds up a finger, hitting upon it. “—because of who you are, Karalee. Because of what your great-grandfather did to her.”
Karalee swallows hard. “Then why aren’t I sick?”
“I—I don’t know. Not everyone gets it.”
“The incubation period,” says Karalee, “is normally weeks.”
“Normally,” Chick admits, “but there’s nothing normal here. Maybe she’s got hold of a superbug. Maybe it built and built inside her to a point of extraordinary virulence.”
“If she made us sick,” says Estela, “can she make us better?”
“Only antibiotics can make us better—presuming this isn’t an antibiotic-resistant mutation. I read a paper that said antibiotic overuse is breeding these resistant bacteria that will one day overwhelm all our advances. People blithely consume this stuff, and they’re inadvertently breeding stronger and stronger strains. The overuse, in other words, far from helping people, is a long-term hazard to the public health.” He harrumphs. “Oh, isn’t this rich? Antibiotics are everywhere except for here on this abandoned island, where we most need them.”
“You don’t know there aren’t any here,” Estela says. “Maybe she has a secret stash.”
Chick likes that idea. “Yes, maybe.” He turns back to Karalee. “Did she slip you a few antibiotics yesterday when no one was looking? Huh, Kiki? Could it be that’s why you’re standing there in the pink while Estela and I—” He coughs and dry heaves. “Estela and I—”
“Are you accusing me of betraying you, Chick?” The thought truly appalls her. “I’d do anything to get you off this island.”
“That so? Dead or alive?” He puts his nose in the air and sniffs. “Smell that, Estela?”
“The burning?”
“No. Above that. Something sweeter.”
“Hmm. I guess so. Bread baking.”
“Yes.”
“She’s cooking somewhere. Where is she, Kiki?”
“How would I know? You’re talking crazy, Chick.”
He shoves her aside with the sweep of an arm. Seizes the metal mixing bowl and drives its base through the nearest windowpane, smashing the glass to shards in two blows. Then he pokes his nose out, sniffing like a dog. “Smell it. It’s out there. She’s out there.” He snarls. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to find that bitch.”
* * *
KARALEE, TOO, SMELLS fresh bread on the wind. But she’s less certain what it means than Chick seems to be in his delirium.
With slow steps, the three of them leave the kitchen and the Tuberculosis Pavilion, emerging out onto the plaza. The rain has stopped, but fog is rolling in, throwing a wet shroud over everything. They can’t see the other buildings, which forces them to feel their way around from memory, Karalee half holding up Estela, whose bad leg drags behind her now as the dead appendage it always threatened to become. She can lift it off the ground only with great effort.
Chick marches ahead, oblivious to their slowness. They stay close to him only because he keeps stopping at short intervals to sniff the air, then readjusts his line of attack to the scent. The fog may be helping in this regard, acting as a magnifier.
Also magnified: the ghostly cries of women and children. All around them, the voices from last night arise, reinvigorated. Their clamor sounds so substantive and so close that Karalee reaches out a few times in an attempt to touch them. But each time, her hand meets nothing but wet air. When Chick pauses longer than usual, she puts the Nikon camera to her eye and peers through the viewfinder. Seeing unmistakable shadows around them shaped like human forms, she snaps a few pictures with the shutter set slow, if only to test whether her eyes are playing tricks.
“What are you doing?” Estela asks.
“Making a visual record.”
“Of the fog?”
After fifteen minutes of nearly blind groping, they arrive at an area where the distinct aroma of baking bread smells stronger than ever. “It’s here,” Chick says, peering through mist at a brick wall just coming into view. “What building is this?”
Karalee shrugs to hide her reluctance. She doesn’t see any good resulting from this chase. But Estela spots the base of a smokestack and points. “It’s the crematorium.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Karalee says, but in a perverse way it makes perfect sense. And it’s hard to argue with the intensity of the smell. As they close in on the building, it becomes clear that Estela guessed right.
They work their way closer and enter through a partially open door to the front hall, which leads to an anteroom that gives way to the heart of the building. A faint glow emanates from the doorway, and warmth radiates from that direction. It feels good on Karalee’s face.
They sense a presence, but inch forward in defiance of their own trepidation. Karalee, considering Chick’s argument, now allows for the possibility that he’s right about Mary’s identity. But if he is right, what does that mean for the future prospects of George A. Soper’s great-granddaughter on this island?
“I wonder whether it’s Josh in there,” Estela says, barely disguising the desperation in her voice.
“What the hell would Josh be doing baking bread?” Chick snaps.
“What would anyone be doing baking bread in a crematorium?” says Estela.
“If it’s the only place with a working oven,” Karalee speculates, “it’s completely logical.”
Her remark goes unanswered. In thirty-six hours, they have become accustomed to bizarre exigencies. Homeless Mary digs in soil where thousands suffered. The Sewer Rats, for their part, press on with their desperate adventure among the empty husk of historical misery that Mary calls home. Such is the nature of abandoned North Brother Island, or so Karalee rationalizes. The island persists in making its demands. What exactly is going on with Estela and Chick, she can’t say. They are sick for real—anyone could see that. But they are not poisoned. She knows this because she ate all the same food they did, and she feels fine. Then again, hasn’t she always felt fine? When eight of every ten students had chickenpox in her elementary school, she remained unscathed. When the flu tore through her high school, laying half the class on their backs, she didn’t miss a beat. When she traveled with her family to Central America and her parents both got food poisoning, she spent a boring day poolside, unaffected, waiting for them to recover. More troubling, now that she thinks about it, she can’t recall ever having so much as a sniffle. Well, she’s lucky that way. Some people are, right?
Her left ear itches like crazy at the site of the scar. So, there’s that—not complete bodily perfection—but then again, this effect was induced by a physical blow, not a bug. She scratches at the scar, feels her nails dig too deep, inflicting mild pain. Forces herself to stop. But it’s getting harder. She licks her dirty finger—tastes salt and a pleasant bitterness—and rubs saliva along the scar.
When she refocuses her attention, they are standing in the middle of the main crematorium space, staring through the dim glow at a line of ovens. Karalee expects to see Mary, but she isn’t here. She notices something else.
“Listen to that,” she says.
As they approached this building, the voices outside grew in volume. Now, within its walls, utter silence prevails. Karalee hears only Estela wheezing in the warm air. They are holding each other, Estela’s urgent grip clawing into Karalee’s arm. Even Chick has lost his nerve and eased closer to them.
Karalee’s joints strain under Estela’s tugging, as burdensome as dead weight. Chick’s legs are trembling. From fever or fear—she doesn’t know.
“What the hell is this? There’s fire inside here,” he says in the tone of an accusation. He shakes himself free of his friends, walks six steps to the wall, and touches the nearest oven door.
* * *
SEVEN RUSTED DOORS hang in a line across the brick crematorium wall like cast-iron sentinels. One door is missing, a pair of sledge tracks disappearing into a dark maw. Another, frozen open, cants off its hinges, clearly nothing burning inside, unless this mysterious fire burns black.
Chick has approached the closed door to the far right. He holds his knuckles against it, and the back of Karalee’s tongue turns cottony. But after five long seconds of contact, he shakes his head. Cold. He steps to the next door. Touches it. His shoulders relax. Cold. The third is broken. He skips it. Touches the next. Cold.
Karalee releases a breath. Sensing greater safety, she and Estela ease toward the wall of ovens. Chick touches the fifth door and quickly withdraws his hand. “It’s warm,” he whispers. Estela has the flesh of a knuckle clamped between her teeth. Karalee squeezes her other hand tight.
Chick grasps the handle to the oven door. Time unfolds with unbearable slowness as he inches the door open, the sledge inside gradually revealing itself. When there are four inches of clearance, he peeks over the top of the door, his face neutral and inscrutable, Estela and Karalee clutching at one another. Then Chick breaks into a wide smile and pulls harder at the door with its attached sledge. As it opens, a gust of heat hits their faces, carrying the strong and distinct aroma of fresh baking bread.
He laughs—half in satisfaction at his rightness, half at the escape from his own fear—and rubs an eye with the knuckle of his forefinger, then runs a hand through his ponytail. In the dim orange light and with the release of tension, he almost looks himself again.
Estela and Karalee step up and peer over the door into the sledge. There’s a large and beautiful loaf of bread inside, well tanned, nearly ready, illuminated by a fire they can’t directly see. Karalee, her stomach growling, wishes she could take a bite out of it right now. Estela, one hand resting on Karalee’s shoulder, giggles so like a little girl that Karalee can see all her worries physically taking flight.
“She’s just a cook.” Estela sighs. “A good cook. I wish I could bear to eat.” She lays a hand across her chest and swallows with a frown.
Chick, too, has already begun to look pale again. He says, “We didn’t come for the bread. We came for Mary. Where is she?” He shuffles a step and spins around, but no one has approached them from behind.
It is hot beside the open oven, oppressive to Karalee. She goes to the oven door in order to close it, grips the handle, and shoves. But it doesn’t slide as easily as she expected, so she plants her feet, employs her legs, and puts her shoulder into it. After applying great effort, and with the sledge guides shrieking, she finally gets it closed.
The hot air dissipates immediately, and she welcomes relative coolness for the first time since the weather changed yesterday. Leaning against the wall between oven doors, she runs her hands through her hair and takes a deep breath. But as she steps to the side of one oven door, her butt brushes against the next. Surprisingly, she finds that it is also warm to the touch.
She looks to her friends, their attention drifting, illness beginning to have its way with them. Where is Josh? she thinks. Where the hell is Josh? In school, she learned about an intellectual approach called Occam’s razor: no more assumptions should be made than are absolutely necessary. So to assume that Mary is Typhoid Mary and that she had anything to do with Gerard’s horrific death and that Josh, now … She can’t bear the thought. Occam—smart guy. More famous than George A. Soper will ever be. And yet, the tug—the tug on her. It comes from George, as George tugged on her father. Soper Soap Cleans Cleanest! What foolishness. Occam can be right or George can be right—not both. Karalee can be right or her father can be right.
Chick has his hands on his hips, jaw set, spinning around and around, as if looking for someone to hit.
“There’s nothing in this oven drawer,” Karalee says quietly, fingers resting on the handle.
“What?” asks Estela, pale-faced, sheened with sweat. She teeters on her feet.
“There is nothing in this drawer, right? Nothing bad. There was bread in the other, but there’s nothing bad in here. Right, Estela, right?”
“I don’t know. I have to lie down.” Estela collapses onto her butt, crumpling onto the dust-covered floor.
“There’s nothing. There will be nothing. There can’t be anything.” Karalee repeating it like a mantra as she grasps the oven-door handle and gives a firm tug. But the sledge resists—everything so disused and rusty around here.
“The oven is empty. Or more bread baking. That’s it: more bread.”
The next time, she pulls with all her might, and the door springs free with a screech, nearly knocking her off her feet. Her throat spasms as she recovers her balance and looks down into the sledge.
“More bread baking. More bread. More bread. Oh, God. Oh, God Almighty.”
Karalee’s stomach somersaults into her suddenly dry throat. She is looking down upon the scorched remains of a young man whose hair has been reduced to cinders and whose broiled lips and nose have peeled back to expose the hard whiteness of a grimacing skull.
She wishes they hadn’t come here—to this room, to this island. For the first time ever, she wishes beyond doubt that she were anyone but the great-granddaughter of the man who set these events in motion. Anything but what she knows in her sinking heart. Yet the black-framed eyeglasses melted onto the face on the sledge reveal inescapable truth. And the twitch in her gut confirms for Karalee what her eyes refuse to acknowledge: that the monstrosity she now looks down upon once walked the earth—walked the earth just this morning—as her dear friend Josh.
* * *
KARALEE FEELS HER mouth stretched wide open with her vocal cords vibrating, but she doesn’t know what, if anything, emerges from the convulsions that run in waves through her chest. Beside her, Chick releases a shuddering groan, and Estela’s earsplitting shriek sends tremors into her soft tissue.
Then they are running—across the crematorium, through the anteroom, out the entrance, and into the night, encased in fog. It makes no sense. They are fleeing a corpse. But they run anyway, so shot through with adrenaline that Estela’s dead leg has come alive and she moves with the grace and urgency of a sprinter.
Soon they scuffle blind in the fog, bereft of any sense of direction. Everywhere around them, the voices of spirits cackle and chitter and carp and wail—individual plaintiffs who share a common indictment against all the living. They harrow Karalee. Pursue her whether she runs forward or shuffles sideways or hugs herself for protection. They are suffocating. She can’t breathe, feels as if they will drown her in their sorrowful clamor. Chick and Estela bat at their own ears, frantic to make the voices go away. They whirl and flail at the thick air to no avail.
Somehow, through the chaos, together the three survivors arrive at the edge of the woods, falling with their backs against the trunk of a large sycamore tree in an attempt to protect their flanks. The shrieking voices persist, human but not human, like the cries of screech owls and hyenas and foxes and—yes—living persons from the General Slocum, all melded together, and the anguish on Chick’s and Estela’s faces is writ so large that Karalee can see it in the dark. It glows with its own horrid energy.
When she turns her attention to herself, she finds that her bottom is wet. She has pissed her pants but doesn’t care, vaguely recalls that she’s wearing a bathing suit underneath her soiled shorts. They are all three wet and foul-smelling, the mist clinging to them, augmenting the animal musk of their fear.
“We’re getting off this island,” Chick says through clenched teeth. “We owe it to Josh and Gerard to make our way out of here even if it ki—” He chokes on the end of the phrase, his words expiring but not his body. Not yet.
Nor does he cry, Karalee notices. None of them are crying. They have passed through sorrow and fear to the pure imperative of survival.
Estela says, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” Rallying herself.
“We’re safe if we stick together,” Chick says. “The bitch only picked them off when they were alone.”
Karalee flinches when she hears Chick call Mary that, although she knows it’s all horrible. He proved himself right about some things she’d rather not dwell upon just now. And yet she can’t bear to denigrate the terrible woman. “If we couldn’t escape during the day,” she says, “we can’t escape now in the dark.”
“We wasted all that time fretting over Gerard.” Chick balls his hand into a fist and snarls. “We have to give one hundred percent to get out of here.”
“Common cause. Sewer Rats,” Estela mutters.
“Not thinking straight won’t help,” Karalee says. “There’s nowhere to go tonight. If we swam for it, we’d drown.”
“We’ll light the whole place up, like Josh wanted to do. Take a match to it.”
“No!” Her mind’s churning. “Everything’s wet right now.”
The voices rise around them. Chick grabs his ears and covers them like an overwhelmed child.
Karalee reaches across Estela’s chest and takes ahold of his forearm to command his attention. “It’s quieter inside. We have to go back to the ward for the night.”
“No.” He drops his hands and flinches at the cry of a banshee stabbing through the woods. “She’ll find us.”
“She’ll find us out here! No walls to protect us, and she knows the terrain better. Inside, we won’t be easily separated. You said yourself she won’t harm us if we stick together.”
Karalee senses his mind working. He grimaces. “The lab. If there’s an antidote—antibiotics or whatever—they could be there.”
“Not far from the ward.”
“Okay,” he concedes. “Which way?”
Karalee is the only one with a full set of wits intact. Even through the thick mist, she thinks she can lead them back. She scratches the scar on her left ear, and the act gives her the sensation of removing rime from a window. She doesn’t feel quite herself, but not because of the sickness that ails Chick and Estela. More like a growing sense of purpose that she can’t yet identify. But she feels it clarifying.
* * *
THE MOON OF last night is a vivid but distant memory. Out in the foggy woods, Karalee has lost all sense of time. They flail in the murkiness for hours—or for minutes that seem like hours—harried without mercy by the spirit voices, urging one another forward when they fall, until a sprawling brick building finally looms into view. The Tuberculosis Pavilion. Has she ever felt so relieved to lay eyes on a pile of clay?
She leads Chick and Estela stumbling and wheezing and dry heaving through the door and across the lobby and up the stairs and down the hall in the direction of the familiar ward. But as they close in on it, Chick hooks her hip and spins her around.
“Not so fast. You promised a look at the lab. We need the cure.” He looks at Estela, who, flagging, nods with her eyes rolling back.
“Of course,” Karalee says.
It is pitch dark. They no longer have Gerard’s lighter or Chick’s borrowed candle to light their way, and Karalee’s camera flash is long dead. They must feel their way back down the hall and around the bend, opening doors to several empty rooms until they finally rediscover the laboratory.
In the presence of counters and dry sinks and disused Bunsen burners, Chick and Estela rally. They rifle through drawers and cabinets, groping for anything that might suggest a bottle or a package of pills, probing the shapes of their finds with their fingertips, and—if they seem promising—holding them up an inch from their noses for careful study. Just in time, the darkness outside has begun to relent, the moon glowing through low-lying clouds. Little light reaches them, but with their eyes now acclimated to darkness, it is enough to function.
When he’s searched every drawer, Chick spreads his gleanings on the counter, sorting through, pushing to the floor that which is useless to him. Eventually, he pauses, holding up to the moonlight a glass sleeve with an old red-and-yellow label. “Holy shit. I found the grail. Against all odds, I have it!”
“What is it?” Karalee asks.
“Prontosil, a sulfur-based drug, the original antibacterial.”
“And it’s still good?”
He shakes the contents into his palm. “We’re going to find out. Let’s see. There are a dozen pills here. Four for each of us.”
Karalee shakes her head. “You guys take it. I’m not sick.”
He shrugs and chokes down half the pills dry, passing the rest to Estela, who accepts them absently and swallows, not taking her eyes off something she found in the cabinet: the old tin specimen box that Gerard originally identified.
“Look,” she says. Two of the six test tubes have their seals freshly broken. “Someone’s been into them recently, and their contents are mostly gone.”
Karalee sidles up next to her. She lifts one of the test tubes to see for herself. Its cork stopper is only half depressed, and a ring of wax has clearly separated from the rim. The glass is fogged or dirty, but she can make out the residue of a liquid that’s the color of concentrated tea.
Chick grabs it from her and peers into it. “The very thing. Mary Mallon’s disease.” He drops the test tube into its slot and pushes away the box in disgust.
Outside, the voices rise in a wailing wave.
Inside, somewhere downstairs, Karalee hears movement.
* * *
THERE IS ONLY one place in the pavilion that still represents relative safety and familiarity, and that is the ward where they slept. With Chick and Estela in tow, Karalee races as fast as her unwell friends allow, down the rubble-strewn hallway and through the open doorway.
Inside, they lurch to an abrupt halt, holding one another, standing shoulder to shoulder. Cots and mattresses and pillows lie strewn about as if tossed by a tornado, and those few windowpanes not previously broken hang in shards.
“Well,” Chick says, breathing heavily, placing his hands on his hips, and barking out a forced laugh at the absurdity of this safety zone, “no more treats on the pillow.”
They gather their strength long enough to push and toss the cots into the doorway, where the items settle into a tangled pile—an improvised fence. Then they grab the mattresses and shove them into the gaps as best they can, using the pillows to block the smaller spaces. As a barricade, it’s fools’ work—anyone can easily shove a pillow aside—but it serves to cocoon them in the room. Out of sight if not out of the madwoman’s mind.
The moment they’re done, Chick falls to the floor, his back against their makeshift barrier. At his direction, Estela takes up a similar position against the sealed door across the room, so if someone attempts to pry it open, she’ll feel it. Karalee sits against the wall between them, under the line of windows.
She twists and looks over her shoulder into the sky. “It’s clearing a little bit. Not so foggy. I can see glimpses of the moon. It’s full—or nearly so. Like last night.”
“Not clear. Clear. Not clear. Clear.” Chick gives an exhausted shrug. “Lotta good that moon did to protect us last night. Maybe the opposite. Maybe without visibility, Gerard doesn’t end up at the tower.”
“At least we can see three feet in front of us now,” Estela says quietly, all the energy drained from her voice. “It did help you find the pills, Chick. Do you think they’ll really work?”
“Have faith, Estela. They’ll make a dent. We need only twelve more hours of strength. By morning, we’ll fetch some matches from the pantry and light this place up. Then the boats will come. They’ll rescue us and grab ahold of Mary.”
“Like they got her last time?” Karalee asks. “With overwhelming force?”
“Until then, we’ll have to be careful,” Chick continues, ignoring her. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal.”
Karalee looks down at her feet. They’re bare, she notices for the first time. Sliced up and scraped, with black filth mortared into the cuts. She must have run right out of her sneakers hours ago. How strange that she didn’t notice. But hysteria drove her then. Now that she’s calm, her feet throb and burn. Her neck hurts where her camera strap has been rubbing all day. Her right hip aches where the Nikon kept bouncing against it. She lifts the strap over her head, can’t resist snapping a picture of the moon veiled behind clouds. Her roll of film has only two shots left. She lovingly sets the camera down by her feet and looks up, assessing her companions.
Sweet, vibrant Estela is a shell of her former self.
Chick—she is growing to hate. That ponytail … the hippie look … his intellectual airs—they’re just a disguise to hide his misogyny. In complete exhaustion, she does see this one thing clearly: If he ever attempts to touch her sexually again, she will kick him in the balls.
She has never done violence to anyone, but in a self-defense class she once attended they taught her to go straight for the testicles, to hit a man where he’s most vulnerable. She wonders whether Mary Mallon ever attempted to kick George A. Soper in the balls. Certainly, notwithstanding the different moral codes of that era, it seems not at all out of character. Also, she wonders, as her mind drifts, whether any of the few surviving women of the General Slocum tried to kick Captain Van Schaick in that most vulnerable spot. Negligent, criminal, despicable Captain Van Schaick. If he didn’t have it coming, who did?
A phrase from her college Shakespeare floats up: “murder most foul.” Yes. The very proper Knickerbocker Steamship Company murdered those women and children just as very proper society murdered Mary Mallon’s hopes, turned her into the walking dead. What difference, really, between her life on North Brother and that of the ghosts?
And Gerard? And Josh? a voice in her head counters. They weren’t Captain Van Schaicks. What did they do to earn what they got? But as soon as she formulates the question, she sees that they were not without fault from Mary’s perspective. They intruded upon her territory, not the other way around. Did they have any right to expect no consequences for their trespass? Do any of those who set foot here?
The voices—the spirit voices. She lets her eyes lose focus, and they recede into background noise, like the chirping of frogs on a pond, only more sinister. They felt deeply threatening during the frantic retreat through darkness and fog, but now they invoke less fear in Karalee. And she is so tired. She struggles to keep her eyes open, looks to her friends, who sit limp and expended. Allows her eyelids to flutter closed, just for a minute.
And she dreams.
Not any dream. The dream. The nightmare more vivid than ever.
She is a small child in a diaper sitting on the linoleum kitchen floor. “Stinky diaper,” she hears her mother say. The diaper has leaked. Kiki stuck her fingers in it, using the mess to finger-paint on the floor. Brown clouds. Brown flowers. Bad girl. Bad Kiki. Her father looms. When she first catches sight of him, she hears the jingle in her mind. Sitting in the car, the big Buick, they once listened for it on the radio. Soper Soap Cleans Cleanest! “Hear the jingle, Kiki? Hear it?” When she giggled, he said, “Oh, you’ll be a Soper through and through!”
But her father isn’t wearing the smile he had when the jingle came on. Bad Kiki. Dirty girl. He is livid, frowning in disgust. Then she’s in his hands, moving through air so quickly that it feels as if her stomach gets left behind. She finds herself roughly set down. Squishy in the stinky diaper. In the dog crate. He slams the door with a clatter. And for good measure, as she cries and reaches her little fingers through the wire of the cage, he picks up the whole thing and gives it a good shake, jostling her. He drops it with a jarring crash, setting the cage wire twanging.
Is this only a dream? It seems so real. She is crying, gasping, suffocating. She must escape it, knows she has to wake herself, but she’s as helpless as a toddler in a cage. She tries to scream but can’t, the scream buried too low in her viscera. With Chick way across the room in one direction and Estela way across the room in the other, who will shake her awake and rescue her?
A scream comes so loud and strident that it sounds unearthly—like something from the depths of hell. It is not Karalee screaming. All at once, she feels an elbow in her chest—Estela sailing into her and sending the camera flying, sliding into the wall to Chick’s right with a crash. Karalee has broken Estela’s fall. It hurt them both, but it woke Karalee in time to witness a blur of movement that came through the previously frozen door, to see the now-familiar skirt, the collection of quilted rags surging across the room. Two, three, four steps. The living ghoul’s face purple with rage. Carving fork poised in the air. Pure hatred in her mismatched eyes.
Chick stirs and looks up just in time to avoid the worst, starts to push himself up off the floor, off center, off kilter. What he sees—what they all see—is a fork-wielding arm arcing down in his direction, inescapable. Karalee hears the air chuff out of him as the fork buries itself in the left side of his chest.
* * *
A MOMENT OF astonishment hangs in the air. Mary stands over Chick, puffing, red-faced. With Estela sprawled on the floor, looking broken, Karalee springs to her feet and runs instinctively to crouch at Chick’s side. The fork missed his heart, but blood drips down like running tears from the two holes where the tines penetrated. She bites her lower lip and raises a hand to pull the fork out.
“Don’t you touch it!” Mary barks. “Let him die! He deserves to die!”
Behind her, Estela has finally, shakily arisen. She scans the room for a weapon and settles on Karalee’s Nikon, lying off to the side. In one quick stooping step, she grabs its strap, spins, and swings the heavy camera at Mary’s head, but the larger woman anticipates danger and straightens up. The camera bounces off her back but does not scathe her. She yanks the strap from Estela’s hand and dashes the camera against the floor.
“You’re evil!” Estela cries. “You killed our friends! You made us sick!”
“I killed no one who did not deserve to be killed. Open your eyes, girl. Them boys and this man invaded my island and shattered my peace. They are the ones need to suffer for a change. And to hell with them!”
“We meant you no harm,” Chick says, wincing with each breath. “We didn’t even know who you were.”
“You do now, mister.” She raises a hand to him.
“Help me, Kiki!” he shouts.
But Karalee remains in a crouch. It’s Estela, instead, who plants her feet and drives her hip into Mary with all her might, knocking her off her mark. Meanwhile, Karalee, finally attempting to shield Chick from Mary’s wrath, has jostled the fork free from his chest. He yelps and gasps, but then wheezes: “I’m all right. I think it hit bone.”
Karalee feels tears running down her cheeks. Doubt creeps in, her inner resolve torn by the spasm of violence. There she was, minutes ago, working up to hatred of Chick, and here she is, now, attempting to protect him. She squeezes her temples. Outside, the spirit voices rise with savage force.
“Hear them,” Mary says, recognizing Karalee’s state. “The women and children. They want justice. Don’t they deserve justice?”
Estela, her eyes coming back alive, has seized Mary’s fork and brandishes it. “Get back! It’s not for you to make justice here!”
“If not here—where? This is where they put me. Think, girl, what they did to me—a poor Irish lass from Cookstown, not so different from yourself. A girl who only wanted to make a living cooking and be left alone. Soper!” She spits on the floor, meets Karalee’s gaze. “You understand, don’t you? I see it in your face. You’re not like that man, your ancestor. You’re with me.”
“I am not with you!” Karalee screams, as much to convince herself as to persuade Mary. She scratches at the scar on her left ear, which itches like mad.
Mary lifts a bushy eyebrow. She grins, showing her snail-shell teeth.
Karalee averts her eyes, her attention disrupted by the sight of her broken camera on the floor. Its back cover has popped off, exposing the undeveloped film inside. She reaches for it and twists the sprockets, begins pulling the film out. Images are visible on the shiny surface—ghostly images. Women and children being consumed in flame. Anguish on their faces.
Her hand goes to her mouth. “Estela! Chick! We need to get out of here.”
“You see them,” Mary says, eyes wide. “You will always see them.”
“No!” Karalee cries, lip trembling. She slings the camera down.
Chick reaches behind him and grabs the leg of a cot and swings the entire thing forward with preternatural force. It smashes into Mary’s side and she goes down like an uprooted tree. He seizes another cot with his last reserves of strength and throws it on top of the fallen woman.
“Run!” Estela screams. “Run!”
The ghost voices scream, too. They are in the pavilion, all around them, grinding like a record played backwards. Karalee doesn’t understand a word they say, but she feels their anguish to the depth of her soul.
And then, following her friends, she runs.