Page 11 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 11

“God, journalists are such sensationalists. They do love to put their noses where they don’t belong. A bunch of half-truths and exaggerations. As if Arthur would ever discuss my wife’s medical history with some eager hack writing for a third-rate newspaper,” Michael said, after he had read the article out loud to those gathered at the breakfast table. He threw the paper down in disgust, then wiped his stained fingers on a napkin.

“But the article does paint our darling Lucy as a hero, as indeed she is,” Katje said, smiling.

“At the expense of Sarah’s privacy and my own.”

“My dear man, how on earth would you have kept it quiet?” Mrs. van Dijk said. “Try and see it in a positive light. That journalist chap did you a favor. He made it very clear you don’t want any company. Nobody with any decency would dare visit unannounced now.”

“That doesn’t stop the other journalists,” Michael retorted.

“Well, no one has ever accused a journalist of having much decency. That would be deadly in their profession.”

“If I see another one of those bastards sneaking around, I’ll put the dogs on him. I told Mr. Hooiman he’s free to shoot at them, too.”

“Rather harsh, don’t you think? Those men are only trying to make a living.”

“Let them do it elsewhere!” Michael said hotly.

Lucy closed her eyes. She wished she could place her hand lightly on his and tell him he shouldn’t let Mrs. van Dijk rile him so, but she couldn’t do that with others present.

Katje, whose face had been spasming between a range of different expressions as she listened to them argue, broke the silence by giggling nervously and saying, “Oh, but those are lovely earrings, Mrs. van Dijk. Emeralds suit your coloring very well.”

“They’re just paste, but thank you,” Mrs. van Dijk said. She brushed her skirt as she spoke, absent-mindedly plucking at the silvery dog hairs that clung to the fabric. All her clothes were covered with it, since she had taken pity on Pasja. The little dog had been slinking around the house, tail so far between her legs that the tip brushed her ribs, the whites of her eyes showing. The day after the almost funeral, as Lucy tried to put on her leash to take her out to walk, she growled and bit her hand, drawing blood. Michael grabbed his cane to give the dog a thrashing despite Lucy’s pleading, would perhaps even have dragged her outside and put her down—saying how a dog that bites people can’t be suffered to live —if Mrs. van Dijk hadn’t intervened. For once, she hadn’t spoken, had simply scooped Pasja up, tucked the dog under her arm as one would a book, and taken her to her room.

Pasja stayed in Mrs. van Dijk’s room now, where she spent most of her days lying on a pillow, sleeping fitfully, or chewing at her paws. She cleaned them carefully, catlike, digging between the toes with her beautiful pink tongue.

When Pasja lay quietly like that, occasionally thumping her tail, it was impossible to imagine the dog had bitten Lucy. The wound wasn’t deep, but Arthur looked at it twice every day for signs of infection and rabies after he was done visiting Sarah.

Lucy wished he wouldn’t. He hadn’t pressed her for an answer to his proposal, and she, coward that she was, didn’t bring it up because she didn’t want to see the hurt on his face when she inevitably rejected him. She loved him too little to make him a good wife and too much to let him settle for her.

Not that she had much time to think about it with Sarah being near. It had been almost a week now since she’d been miraculously restored to life. Michael was at least partially right when he said journalists were sensationalists, because the journalist who had written that article in De Nieuwe Murmerwolderse Courant had tried to make his piece more interesting by fabricating details. There had been no piercing shrieks, no matching fainting fits.

Instead, Sarah repeated that she was hungry before tearing the veil from her face. It came away with a horrible wet ripping sound, and her ruined eye wept black and yellow fluid. The reek of it—sweet, cloying, so strong that it was almost physical—made them gag. Sarah’s good eye rolled back, and she slumped in her coffin, her bony elbows knocking against the sides, the sound muffled by the lining of red velvet. Lucy hastened to her sister’s side, took her in her arms, kissed her brittle hair, and wiped away the sludgy tears with her handkerchief while trying not to look too closely at what remained of the eye. Sarah tried to fend her off with weak hands, whimpering, but that was good, because it meant she was alive, alive, alive…

The first thing Lucy did when they returned to Zwartwater was sew a number of eye patches for her sister. She had sewn them once before, for Aunt Adelheid. She and Vera, the maid she had trained to be her assistant, had gone out one hot summer night with a lit lantern and a butterfly net to catch moths. For their trouble, they were rewarded with several moths as well as copious mosquito bites and, in Aunt Adelheid’s case, an infected eye; something had flown in, and in a reflex, she had rubbed her eye hard, grinding the insect to pulp rather than dashing it away. Within a day, the eye reddened and swelled and wept pus. Any other woman might have been mortified, but Aunt Adelheid only laughed and said that, though it was a damn shame she wouldn’t be able to catch moths for a while now on account of her not being able to perceive as much depth with only one eye, she’d always rather fancied being a pirate. When she had healed, she’d confessed to Lucy she was almost sorry she would not be wearing an eye patch anymore, for Vera had found it wonderfully rakish, and was there anything more pleasurable in life than impressing a woman?

Lucy could only hope that, in time, Sarah, too, would come to love wearing an eye patch. Unlike Aunt Adelheid’s, her eye would never heal. The eyelid was still tattered, but occasionally, when Sarah blinked, the wounded eyelid moved, too, and Lucy could hear the scrabble of her lashes against the velvet. It sounded eerily similar to Sarah scratching at the inside of her coffin.

Arthur had taught Lucy how to clean the wound. Though it gave her that strange fluttery feeling in her head and belly, she bit down and did as she should; she could not bear the idea of Magda or any of the other servants being revolted by her sister. Lucy washed the wound twice a day, then packed the now-empty socket with cotton wool. On the second day, Arthur removed what remained of the eyeball to prevent rot from setting in; by then, a kind of fungus had already begun to grow, so he burned it.

“I know how it must sound, but it’s a lucky thing she used a pen to destroy her eye and not her fingers,” Arthur had said as he’d prepared his instruments for the operation.

“Because of possible infections?”

He shook his head. “No, because of the angle of penetration. The pen went in at an angle of almost ninety degrees to the eye. Had she tried it with her thumb, she might have rooted around and gone down past the occipital bone, which can cause convulsions or even death. I’ve seen it happen once during a bar fight. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

He looked her over, then said, “If you are ever attacked, remember that eye gouging is extremely effective at incapacitating an attacker. For someone as small and slight as you, it’s probably the best way to defend yourself. Thrust hard and thrust deep. You must crush the eyeball or at least cause severe hemorrhaging if you are to take out your assailant.”

She remembered the sickening crunch and the jelly of Sarah’s eye running down her cheek like yolk, and thought she might be sick. “I’ll keep it in mind,” she’d managed to say.

Sarah’s eye socket did not seem to be healing yet.

“But it might be too early for that yet. For days, she teetered on the brink of death. It mustn’t be wondered at that her body’s processes are tardier than what we might expect in a healthy woman,” Arthur had told her when she’d brought it up. He’d smiled at her, reached out to press her hand and soothe her, then seemed to remember he was still waiting for her to tell him whether she’d be his wife and dropped it again. “Try not to fret. There are no precedents for cases like this, you know.”

Yet Lucy couldn’t help but feel that her sister wasn’t behaving the way she should. This feeling was exacerbated when she went to Sarah’s room to have tea with her, only to find Sarah had taken a pair of scissors to her hair and hacked it off. Strands of it lay in her lap, hung in the crook of her elbow, and clung to the fabric of her nightgown.

Lucy pressed her hands against her mouth. The muscles in her throat clenched so hard, it took a moment before she could speak. When she did, her voice came out pained and childlike. “Saartje, what on earth have you done to your hair?”

“I cut it.”

“I can see that, but why, in God’s name? And who gave you the scissors?”

“I can’t afford to spend energy on growing hair.”

“Did Arthur tell you that?”

“I didn’t need him to tell me.”

Lucy picked up a strand and twisted it between her fingers. “But you love your hair,” she said helplessly. “It’ll take you years and years to grow it out again.”

“It can’t be helped. It was all brittle and damaged and horrible. This way, it’ll grow back much faster.”

With this, Lucy couldn’t argue. “Still,” she said, as the hair rustled dryly against her fingers, “you could’ve asked me to help you. You needn’t have given yourself a fever cut. Give me the scissors, and I’ll snip off whatever hair you missed.” She held out her hand. For a moment, she wondered if her sister might argue, but Sarah extracted a pair of embroidery scissors from between the sheets and handed them over without complaint. They were made of silver, plain but sharp and shockingly cold.

“These aren’t yours. Who gave them to you?” Lucy asked.

Sarah’s face was curiously still, almost more like a marble effigy than a real face. “Don’t treat me like a child. I don’t care for it.”

“I’m not treating you like a child.”

“Yes, you are. You and my husband and the doctor treat me like a fucking child! Do you think I’m stupid? You’re watching me all the time. You talk to me in that special sort of voice you use only when you think I’m insane again. You’ve even removed sharp objects from my room. As if I’m likely to put a pair of scissors through my other eye, or a pen, or a knife—or a needle or a pin or a fork or, God help us all, a fucking teaspoon!”

Lucy looked at the scissors in her hand, fit her fingers in the handles, and opened and closed the blades. They snicked together beautifully. “There’s no need for you to be angry with me, and there’s no need to swear either. You never much used to.”

“Well, I’ve changed. A pen through the eyeball will do that to a person.”

Sarah, screaming. A wet crunch, followed by a soft trickle. The meaty stink of it. How easily those sensations rose in Lucy’s mind, how hard to push them back into the darkness again.

“That’s why we’re so careful with you. We don’t mean to infantilize you; we’re merely worried. Surely you can understand that? Now, please don’t talk about it anymore,” she said in a small voice.

She cut off the remaining locks, and there was only the sound of the scissors snipping, the swish of the strands of hair falling into Sarah’s lap, and the droning of a bluebottle at the window. It thudded against the glass, was still for a moment, then flew up again, buzzing.

When she was done, Lucy slipped the scissors into the pocket of her dress. She gathered the hair, then put it in a twist of newspaper. “Would you like to keep it?”

“Whatever for? There’s no need to braid it into bracelets and necklaces anymore. I’m still alive, after all.”

Lucy took her sister’s bony hand and brought it to her mouth to kiss it. It was the one she had rubbed against her face so vehemently that the top layer of skin had sloughed off, though flaky patches remained, mainly at the knuckles. A line of dead skin, the edges translucent and raggedy, ran across Sarah’s wrist like the thinnest strip of lace, marking the place where the skin had torn and come away. Like the eye, this had not yet begun to heal.

“And for that I’m more grateful than I could ever say. You know that, right? That I love you more than anyone else in this world?”

“Of course I know that,” Sarah murmured, resting her cold cheek against their clasped hands.

“Shall I ring for tea? Cook made some of those watercress sandwiches you love, and some little cakes, too.”

Anything to get her to eat.

Despite her assertion that she was— fucking— starving, Sarah had barely been eating since she had almost been buried, which struck Lucy as yet another strange thing; surely someone as starved as Sarah should want to do nothing but eat?

Magda brought up a tray with cups and a steaming-hot pot of tea, as well as an étagère with sandwiches, cakes, small bowls of berries, and bits of apple shaped like triangles. Back when Lucille had still been alive, all fruits had needed to be carved into stars, or she wouldn’t eat them. Lucy remembered holding her godchild in her lap, helping her take sips of her cup of milk and feeding her bits of pear and hothouse melon with sticky fingers, the air around them perfumed by the sweet juices.

The dull pain of missing her niece brought tears to her eyes. Under the pretext of spooning cream in her tea, she bent over her steaming cup to hide them. She watched the cream unspool, creeping through the liquid like tendrils of fog. By the time her tea paled into an even color, the tears had gone.

She brought the cup to her mouth, readying herself to take a sip.

It was then that the bluebottle, which had ceased throwing itself at the window a minute before, landed on Sarah’s eye. Not on the lid nor the soft creased skin underneath; it landed on her remaining eyeball.

And she did not blink.

It sat there, rubbing its front legs together in the way flies were often observed to do, as if washing them with the fluid that coated Sarah’s eyeball, and she did not instinctively blink to get rid of it. She did eventually raise a hand to her face and plucked the fly out, then crushed it between her thumb and index finger, but the movement was deliberate, precise, not the quick panicked dashing one would expect from having something in one’s eye.

That is not normal , Lucy thought, then shuddered so violently that her jaws snapped shut.

A crack, very loud to her. The feel of something smooth and hard against her tongue. Tea dribbled down her cup and into her lap, hot at first but quickly cooling. She lowered the cup, staring at it in astonishment, her heart racing. A piece was missing. For a second, she was utterly confused. Then she realized what had happened: she had bitten through the rim and now held a piece of it in her mouth.

She probed it with her tongue. Sharp pain lanced the tip, strong enough to bring tears to her eyes. She gagged, then spat into her cupped hand. The shard of china fell into it, glistening. A strand of saliva threaded through with red still connected it to her mouth. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, causing it to snap.

“My God, are you all right? Did you just take a bite out of that cup?” Sarah asked.

“I didn’t mean to,” Lucy said thickly; blood had pooled into her mouth. She swallowed. The blood had mixed with the tea, leaving a bitter, metallic taste behind.

Sarah dumped the contents of her cup back into the teapot and held it out for Lucy. “Here. You shouldn’t swallow blood. It’ll make you sick.”

She spat and spat. She felt as if she were at the dentist, being asked to rinse after a cavity had been filled or a tooth extracted. All she lacked was the smell of gas and antiseptic. Soon, she had spat out enough blood and saliva to fill the bottom of the cup. Her tongue throbbed. The tip already felt raw and swollen. She pressed it against the ribbed roof of her mouth.

“Has it stopped bleeding?” Sarah asked.

“I think so.”

“Let me look.”

“I’m sure it feels much worse than it is.” Her tongue touched the back of her teeth as she spoke, and she winced.

“Let me look.”

Lucy stuck out her tongue. Sarah cocked her head, took hold of her sister’s tongue with her thumb and index finger, and pinched it. Tears sprang into Lucy’s eyes. The cut began to bleed again. A drop ran down Sarah’s thumb.

Now it was Sarah who shuddered violently. She thrust her thumb into her mouth and sucked it. When she extracted it, she fixed her eye on Lucy. So strange was her stare, so unlike Sarah, that the blood drained from Lucy’s hands and feet and face, leaving her cold.

The only warmth came from the cut on her tongue, which throbbed very fast, echoing her heartbeat.

When Sarah fell upon her, Lucy let out a choked scream and tried to scrabble back. Her heels found little purchase on the waxed floorboards. The chair’s legs screeched as they ground against the wood, which made the hairs on Lucy’s body rise.

She’s going to bite me! She’s going to rip out my throat and drink me up like she tried with Arthur. She—she—she will drain, will empty me…

Sarah’s fingers closed around her wrist. Her nails had been broken as she clawed at the lining of the coffin—three had come away altogether; the remaining ones Lucy had cut and filed down. She felt the hard press of those two nails against the tender inside of her wrist, felt the soft wrinkled flesh of the fingers where the nail had been ripped out completely. How intimate to feel what was normally hidden, yet how deeply unpleasant, too, like brushing against a cut of cold meat that had been skinned and lay ready to be chopped and put in the pot.

Sarah tightened her grip. She needed only to press down a little, and the skin at Lucy’s wrist would split, exposing the thick veins and the thread-thin capillaries that ran underneath. Sarah could tear those open with her teeth, and then the blood would flow fast and freely, and then…

Sarah wrenched the cup from Lucy’s hand, then let go of her wrist and retreated, clutching the cup to her chest. Sarah’s gray teeth— save for that porcelain one; God, how incongruous it looks; we should have gone with a different hue, not so horribly white —were bared. Her gums seemed almost lavender. She brought the cup to her mouth and tilted it, causing the mixture of blood and saliva and dregs of tea to dribble out.

She drank, licked, sucked.

Her eye rolled back into her skull, and her eyelids fluttered; the tattered one rustled against the eye patch like a nail being dragged over velvet.

For a moment, it looked like she might faint, yet Lucy did not take her by the elbow nor put an arm around her waist to steady her. Instead, Lucy sat frozen, little chills swimming up and down her back. The blood she had swallowed churned in her stomach.

When not a single drop remained, Sarah sank back, panting but smiling. Without opening her eye, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then sucked the skin, her brows knitted. Her cheeks were flushed prettily.

Oh, she’s beautiful , Lucy thought. Rationally, she knew her sister was not—Sarah was emaciated, her skin a sickly gray, her shorn scalp mottled with bald spots—yet she was beautiful, if one could only lift away the veil and see , just as Sarah had been able to do with the bog woman…

Horror took Lucy by the throat with such force, she squawked. Her stomach cramped, and she burped softly, painfully. Her heart pounded, each beat like being thumped in the chest. Perhaps a person truly could be scared to death, and this was what it felt like.

Sarah opened her eye. Her smile faded. “Oh, Lucy,” she whispered. She got up and crawled to her, and Lucy was too weak to flee, to fend her off. Sarah pressed her cheek against her sister’s knee. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be afraid. I love you. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just so terribly hungry and thirsty all the time.” Speaking of it must have had her salivating; she swallowed twice in rapid succession.

“Then why don’t you eat?” Lucy managed to whisper.

“I can’t. I know you don’t believe me, but I truly can’t. I wish I could. It would make things much easier.”

Lucy hesitated, then touched her sister’s shorn head, placing her fingers in the bluish hollow where skull and vertebrae connected. Even her scalp was cold. “I think there’s something very wrong with you, Sarah.”

“I know. Please don’t tell anyone else about what you saw me do. People have been sent to asylums for much less.”

“You aren’t Aunt Adelheid, and I’m not our parents.” Lucy dropped a kiss on her head. The short hairs were deliciously soft, but there was a smell that clung to them that Lucy realized rose from Sarah’s skin; it was far from delicious: stale, earthy, bitter, and sweet, like fruit molding, like mold fruiting. “I would never just send you to an asylum.”

“It wouldn’t be ‘just,’ though, would it? It would be the sleepwalking, and what I did when Lucille died, and my morbid obsession with Marianne…” Sarah let out a desperate sob.

“Who is Marianne?”

Sarah was quiet for a moment, then murmured, “The bog woman.”

“Saartje, what is happening?” Lucy asked.

But Sarah did not answer, only swallowed thickly.