Page 3 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 3

It happened so fast, Lucy did not understand at first.

With a cry, Arthur tried to pull back, dropping the glass and spilling its contents into Sarah’s lap. She didn’t even seem to notice. All her attention was on preventing Arthur from pulling away. She had a firm hold on his wrist and wouldn’t let go. Her mouth stayed fastened on the inside of his lower arm, her lips pulled back, revealing her large teeth sunken into the soft flesh.

“Sarah!” Lucy cried out. She grabbed her sister by the shoulders so she could wrench her from Arthur, yet those bony shoulders and emaciated arms belied her sister’s strength. Sarah would not be pulled away. In fact, she didn’t seem to care that Lucy was yanking on her, nor did she care that Arthur was trying to pry her fingers from his wrist. She chewed and she drank.

In the end, it was Katje who saved them by upending the jug of water from the bedside table over Sarah’s head. Sarah cried out and shied away, her teeth bared. The lines between them were colored pink.

Arthur stumbled back, clutching his wounded arm. He tripped over a stool, then sat heavily and without dignity. Blood trickled from between his fingers. The smell of it was thick in the air: salt and metal.

Sarah, meanwhile, had recovered from the shock of the cold water. She took up the drenched sheet and sucked at the spot where Arthur’s blood had dripped and spoiled it, crouching over it like an animal, shivering with cold or perhaps with pleasure.

Lucy felt as if she might cry. The soft little noises of Sarah’s sucking, the quiver in her throat as she swallowed, the harsh glitter of her eyes glimpsed through the mop of her dripping hair—all of it was horrible and wrong.

“I’m so sorry,” Katje said. Her mouth was twitching from amusement to horror and back again. She bent over Sarah and tried to wipe her face with a corner of the sheet.

“That’s no use. The sheet is soaked. We must get her out of those wet clothes and in front of the fire. Let’s pray the shock of such freezing water to her system won’t prove fatal,” Arthur said, the words clipped, his voice rough. He made to help lift Sarah out of bed, but Lucy blocked his path.

“Let us do it. With your arm like that, you’re of no use to anyone,” she said, then went to pull the bell rope to summon one of the maids. For a moment, it looked as if Arthur would argue, but when he spoke, it was only to excuse himself.

Together, Katje and Lucy helped Sarah out of bed. They undressed her and put her in a dry shift and nightgown. That done, two maids carried in a divan of purple velvet, so Lucy laid Sarah on it and covered her with blankets. During all this, she was still and quiet. When Katje mixed a draught to make her sleep, she drank without complaint, the corners of her mouth twisting at the bitter medicinal taste.

“I shall stay with her,” Lucy said.

Katje shook her head and said, “You need to get out of those wet clothes and get warm. Sarah wouldn’t want you to sicken. You can sit with her then, though she’ll be fast asleep soon and will want for nothing we can provide.”

Lucy thought of arguing, but Katje spoke sense, and she needed a little time alone to think. When she stepped out of the room, into the cold and damp of the hallway, she took a shuddering breath and tried to press what she had seen just now deep inside her, where all the painful things went, large and small: the worm Sarah had torn in two; the woman on the train crushing the spider; Michael, always Michael…

Arthur, meanwhile, had not progressed beyond the hallway either. He leaned heavily against the wall as he tried to bind his handkerchief around his arm. When he could not do it with one hand, he cursed under his breath. His face was ashen, his fingers unsteady. Lucy wondered if he might faint.

“Let me,” she said, taking the scrap of fabric from him. The wound was an ugly thing, ragged and horrible, but the flow of blood was slowing, and its place on the middle of his lower arm meant it would not impede his movements. Yet to know it was Sarah who had made it…

Better not to think of that and focus at the task at hand. She folded his handkerchief and pressed it against the injury, causing him to hiss in pain. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. You aren’t responsible for Sarah. At the moment, I fear Sarah isn’t even responsible for Sarah. Mark my words: if this fever breaks, it might well be she won’t even remember what she did.”

“It’s much worse than I expected,” Lucy admitted. She took out her own handkerchief and wound it around his arm before securing his handkerchief in place.

“Then I must apologize. I should have done a better job preparing you.”

“Nothing could have prepared me for this. There. All done.”

She did not linger, for she did not wish to hear him chastise himself, nor did she wish to talk any more of what had just happened. People sometimes thought her cold and reserved, arrogant, even, but in truth, she was merely quiet and pensive. As a child, she had been painfully shy with everyone except her aunt and sister. She’d had something of a stammer, which had made her loath to speak. This speech impediment as well as her tongue-tiedness had since been overcome, but old habits die hard, so she remained largely quiet.

Despite Michael’s assurance that she need not write ahead, they would be ready to receive her at all times, her usual room had not been prepared. Most likely Michael had simply forgotten to tell the servants, or if he had, he had not known what orders to give; running the household was Sarah’s domain, and he did not like to interfere with it.

However it had happened, the room had not been aired, and the fire in the grate had only just been lit, giving it no time to dispel the cold and damp. But her things had been brought up, and it was a place where she could be alone and unwitnessed, so she did not mind.

Her room was known as the Silver Room, so called for the wallpaper, which was patterned with silver waves, and the wood of the fruit trees that had been used for the fireplace and wainscoting, which glowed a lovely silver if the light hit the material in a certain way.

How well this name suits it in such dreary weather , Lucy thought. The scant autumn light was blunted and cooled by clouds so dark, they seemed bruised. It silvered the windows, which were awash with rain, and made running patterns on the wall. It was like sitting in a sea cave.

She peeled off her gloves, now merely damp rather than sodden, then took off her hat and began to pull out the pins that kept her hair up. Tendrils of it, damp and twisted like rope, slithered down her neck and shoulders. When it was all down, she combed it with a silver-backed brush that belonged to her sister. In this queer light, her hair seemed as silver as the brush, though in reality it was merely an ashy blond.

I could be a mermaid or sea witch, combing my hair and counting the souls of the drownèd damned , she thought as she looked at her face in the mirror, which was speckled black because the abundance of water that had given the estate its name meant the house was often intolerably damp, and dampness spoiled things, wore them out.

She braided her hair. She’d have to put it up for dinner but was suddenly so exhausted, she couldn’t be bothered. Besides, she didn’t even know if dinner would be served the proper way. They might send her a tray and have her eat in this room, which she generally enjoyed; that way no one could see how much or how little she ate except for the servants. Yes, why go through the trouble of serving dinner when there was only Michael to enjoy it, now that Sarah was too ill to leave her bed? Only, he wouldn’t be alone, not tonight, though if the room was any indication, no one would have taken her into account when preparing dinner.

She should just ask Michael and make sure. But he was not here, else he would have welcomed her. He was probably outside, the streaming rain be damned, walking so fast that his legs burned, trying to outrun his fear and worries, the way he had done when his little daughter had lain choking and crying as she died of scarlet fever.

Lucy sank onto the nearest chair and sat pinching the bridge of her nose in an effort to stem the tears. The images and half-formed thoughts she had been so careful to push down now rose to the surface, forcing her to witness them.

Lucy had been prepared to see her sister sick and suffering, and she had been prepared to withstand and ignore all the little indignities that came with it: the smells, the fluids, the helplessness. But she had not thought the illness would reduce her sister to a kind of demented beast, biting their lifelong friend and lapping up the blood like a dog. She kept hearing the soft sucking sounds Sarah had made as she had gnawed on Arthur’s arm and when she had taken the blood-splattered cloth into her mouth.

How was it possible that Sarah had gone from a healthy young woman to this emaciated, rabid creature in less than two weeks? For she had been healthy then, excited and productive. It almost beggared belief that a mere fever of the brain could wreak such changes. Yet some diseases ravaged the way fire did, swiftly and without mercy. They had seen that with Lucille, hadn’t they? Lucy could ask why all she wanted, but that way lay no satisfaction, only madness.

After a while, she pulled herself together enough to take up a buttonhook and set about unbuttoning her boots. When this was done, she rolled down her left stocking, revealing skin whitened with cold, the toes tinged blue. She took her foot in hand and squeezed and rubbed it to get the blood flowing again, wincing and gasping at the pain. Yet she welcomed the throbbing and burning because it let her mind focus on something other than the display she had just witnessed.

The knock on the door came when she sat massaging her other foot to life, tears blinding her.

“Who is it?” Lucy asked.

“It’s Katje. May I come in?”

“Yes.”

She slipped inside, closed the door behind her, then leaned against it. She had a mark on her cheek.

Arthur’s blood , Lucy thought, feeling as if she might heave.

“I thought you might need help undressing,” Katje said. She tried to look Lucy in the eye, then let her gaze wander, as she usually did.

“That’s thoughtful of you, but I could ring for one of the maids.” Lucy did not know the exact relationship between Katje and Michael, bar that she was some sort of poor relation who depended on his charity. Such women were supposed to be loyal companions, help rear the children, nurse the sick—in short, to make themselves useful in any way. But they were members of the family still, not servants, and so, in much the same way Lucy was not expected to help Mrs. van Dijk with her hair and clothes because she was a companion and not a maid, Katje could not be expected to help Lucy now.

“It’s no trouble. I do it for Sarah all the time. She likes it better when I undress her than Magda. She can be rough and impatient, you see.” And Katje smiled, temporarily stilling the spasming around her mouth. She came to Lucy and began to unfasten the hooks and buttons of her dress. Katje had rather beautiful hands, long and thin, the wrists delicate, the sort of hands an artist might wish to make a plaster cast of so he could model his sculptures and paintings on them. As she worked, she hummed a little song in a high-pitched voice, then giggled nervously at nothing at all.

She really is a nervy creature, quite strange , Lucy thought.

It’s because she was brutalized as a child , Sarah had told her once. I don’t know the details of it, nor do I wish to, though I can imagine. Suffice to say she suffered abominably. When Michael’s mother heard of it, she did the proper thing and took the girl in.

Such suffering was bound to leave a mark. It was really quite extraordinary, Lucy thought as Katje undid the buttons at her cuffs, that the girl was merely odd and overly anxious, but still capable of love and kindness and decency; in her place, Lucy feared she might have become emotionally damaged to the point of numbness or perhaps even cruelty, the way her mother had after Aunt Adelheid had died. The way I will if Sarah… But that shan’t happen, and as long as I have her, I can survive and withstand anything.

They did not speak as Lucy undressed, and the air grew heavy between them with what they had witnessed but did not speak of. As Katje laced her into her corset, Lucy broke the pregnant silence between them, asking, “Have you seen the bog body? The one they found two weeks ago?”

But that is not what I wanted to ask at all , she marveled as soon as the words had left her mouth.

Katje’s hands stilled. She was quiet for so long that Lucy had already given up on the idea that she’d speak, and then she did. “You mustn’t speak of that to Sarah, you know,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“It upsets her.” Katje inhaled slowly, carefully; Lucy felt her breath stir the little white hairs on the nape of her neck.

“But why?” Lucy pressed.

“Did Doctor Hoefnagel tell you that she’s scared of someone?” Katje asked, and her breath ruffled those little hairs at her nape in the opposite direction.

“Yes. He said he didn’t know who she could be, though.”

Katje giggled nervously. “Did he? And him so learned, I thought it would be obvious. Poor Sarah is terrified of the bog woman.”

“Oh,” Lucy said. A pain rose in her stomach, insistent as nausea, sharp as a pang of hunger. “That makes sense, I suppose.” It truly did. Sarah’s letters had grown bizarre and disturbing—perverse, even—only after the bog body had been found.

“There. All laced up,” Katje said. She picked up the dress of green velvet Lucy had chosen, helped it over her head.

“But have you? Seen the body, I mean?” Lucy repeated.

“No.” Katje did not look at her but bent her pale face over Lucy’s arm to do up the buttons of her sleeve. Her fingers trembled against the inside of Lucy’s wrist. She seemed on the cusp of saying something more when the front door slammed shut with such force, the water in the pitcher on Lucy’s bedside table rippled.

A man roared, not unkindly, “Will someone take this bloody dog from me?”

Then Michael has come home at last , she thought, briefly closing her eyes.

Letter from Mrs. Sarah Schatteleyn to Miss Lucy Goedhart

Zwartwater, 21 September, 1887

Darling Lucy,

Today, Arthur and an old schoolmate of his, a specialist in decomposition named Doctor Rosenthaler, conducted the autopsy. I helped them, not by sketching, but by taking down everything they said and did.

I wish I hadn’t. I’m uneasy in mind, both troubled and frightened, and it’s all because of that blasted bog body! We should have put it back in the ground, as Mr. Hooiman suggested.

Too late now, though.

The beginning of the autopsy was unremarkable. It was mainly a rehashing of things you and I already know: When was the body found? Who found it? When did they find it, and how? What did it look like? As I made my notes, Doctor Rosenthaler kept exclaiming what a wonder the body was, what a miracle its preservation. His delight was really quite endearing.

“How old do you think she is?” I asked, but he shook his head and said he could not yet say. He was rather disappointed that we had found nothing in the surrounding peat; most bog bodies have at least some clothes buried with or near them, and those would help pin down when she had been murdered.

“But the lack of clothes is interesting in and of itself,” he rallied. “It makes it likely she was sacrificed, or else sentenced to die. The poor souls who wander into the bogs and drown by accident tend to be dressed. Of course, the stakes driven through her joints also point in that direction.”

He suggested those stakes were to keep the body submerged. He made a joke about pickles, then grew serious again and said that the staking may have been used as a form of torture if the poor wretch was still alive when they were driven in.

The doctors were less certain as to the significance of the stone in her mouth. Doctor Rosenthaler thought it might have been used to gag the woman, though he had to concede it was a strange way to keep someone from crying out, dangerous and cruel. Arthur suggested it was a form of punishment. The lack of incisors, they ignored almost completely.

All the time, I had to keep myself from laughing at their silliness. It seemed to me perfectly clear why her murderers had crammed a rock in her mouth. “It’s to keep her from eating,” I said at last, when I could stand their discussion no more.

They both gave me such a funny look, you’d think I’d have said something utterly strange!

I elaborated: “The staking, the forceful thrusting of the stone between her teeth, the pulling of her incisors, burying her face down, all of it was done to confuse her and keep her tied to the earth and render her unable to use her mouth in case she came back.”

“Came back?” Arthur asked, still not understanding.

I explained to them patiently that the little research I had done before the autopsy suggested this was the sort of thing people used to do to the corpses of suicides and others who were deemed in danger of becoming revenants, or who were thought to have become revenants already. To be fair, that sort of thing hasn’t happened in our country for almost three hundred years, but travel stories are rife with it.

“Where would we be without your help?” Arthur laughed when I was done.

Finally, he and Doctor Rosenthaler began to touch the body. No part of her was to be left untouched. They looked at her fingers first, scratched under her nails to see if there was anything but peat crusted under there. They combed her hair for the same reason, doing it very carefully so as not to rip it from the scalp. Her loins were inspected very carefully to try and determine her sex, but neither of them wanted to commit. I joked that they were being bad sports, seeing as they had a fifty percent chance to be right, and weren’t those good odds? But they refused to be drawn.

“We’ll know once we’ve had a look at the organs,” Doctor Rosenthaler said and picked up a knife, and I thought privately that he was no fun at all; I can’t stand men without humor.

“Won’t you need a saw to cut through her bones?” I asked as he set about making incisions in her chest.

“The body from Schleswig-Holstein didn’t have any bones left. The bog consumes them,” Arthur told me.

“Is that why her head is so dented? Because there’s no skull to help it keep its shape?” I asked.

“Perhaps, though a fierce blow to the head could have caused it to become misshapen, too. The weight of the peat may have crushed it further.” He made a quick sketch of the different parts of the skull for me and explained how they are separate when we are born, to allow the head to be squeezed through the birth canal, and only fuse together and harden with time. Dear Arthur! He so loves to explain. He would have made a fine schoolteacher. His boyish enthusiasm is infectious.

Yet, throughout his talk, I was very conscious of the sounds Doctor Rosenthaler made as he hacked away at the bog woman, the squelching and the scraping, opening her up so he could plunge his hand inside and draw her secrets from her, and I felt a strange sensation running along my sternum. It wasn’t quite a pain, but it was unpleasant, the way you can experience a phantom pain when you see someone suffering horribly. She won’t like this at all, I thought suddenly. I had to admonish myself then for being fanciful. Really, you’d think I’d never seen a creature being dissected before! Of course, those were only mice and dogs and, once, a calf, but mammals all look remarkably similar once you’ve opened them up; it’s only their size and the number of nipples that differ.

Meanwhile, Doctor Rosenthaler was prying open the bog woman’s chest, draping fronds of hide-like flesh over her upper arms. This accomplished, he held up a lamp and stood peering into the cavity, doing nothing. He had a mighty frown that seemed to be carved into his forehead. “Arthur,” he said after a while in a small voice, “I think you should take a look.”

Inside, the bog body was completely empty.

“Perhaps the bog ate her organs, just as it ate her bones,” Arthur proposed, but Doctor Rosenthaler shook his head. Other bog bodies did not look like this one. Arthur said that perhaps the murderers had removed the organs before throwing the body into the bog, but she had no mark on her bar the one Doctor Rosenthaler had made.

“There must be a rational explanation,” I said. “The Egyptians used to draw the brain out through the nose. They’d thrust a hook into the cavity of the skull through the nostrils, and move it about until the brain was all cut up and could dribble out.”

“And which hole do you suggest they used to extract several meters of intestine, two kidneys, a liver, two lungs, and a heart, Mrs. Schatteleyn? Through the mouth? Or through the anus?” Doctor Rosenthaler asked me curtly.

Had I been less uneasy, I would have told him spitefully he had forgotten to mention the bladder, esophagus, womb, and ovaries, and that women have an extra hole in which a hook can be inserted very well, as most men can attest to, but a lady can’t say such a thing unless she wants to be thought crude and unwomanly, or worse, mad.

“Sarah is right. There must be an explanation that we are currently not seeing,” Arthur said soothingly.

They went on with their work, much quieter now. They took some measurements, then closed her back up. It all happened rather quickly, since there was not much else to do and not much to look at.

Then there was only the head left.

With a hammer and chisel, Doctor Rosenthaler carefully broke the rock inside her mouth and extracted it piece by piece, dropping them on some cloth so he could glue it back together later. His hands were not quite steady. Afterward, her poor lips were covered with dust, which Arthur wiped away carefully with a bit of damp cotton wool.

He looked into her mouth and said, “She lacks a tongue. Do you think it was torn out?”

Doctor Rosenthaler replied, “There’s no sign of a wound. I bet the same mysterious process that consumed the organs could make short work of a tongue, which is, after all, no more than a strong muscle.”

“But then why not the rest of the body, too? She doesn’t lack muscles, just organs.”

“My dear man, if I knew, I’d tell you, but I’m as much in the dark as you are,” Doctor Rosenthaler said. Despite the coolness of the cellar, he had sweat beading on his forehead and glistening in his sideburns.

They took measurements of her head, then prodded the dents with the back of their tools. Arthur repeated his earlier remarks about the possibility of the head being staved in, which might well be the cause of death. That, or the stake driven through her neck.

Nothing left to do but look inside her head, then.

Doctor Rosenthaler opened up the top. A smell filled the room, so strong that even Arthur and Doctor Rosenthaler gagged, and throughout their careers, their noses have been abused by all manner of filth. I had to press my sleeve to my mouth. My eyes watered. It was unlike anything I’d ever smelled before, and I struggle to describe it. It came right through the fabric of my sleeve, burned inside my nose and throat and mouth, almost like a physical thing.

In the end, we bound cloths soaked in lavender water over the lower halves of our faces. That scent was also overpowering and cloying, but we were able to bear it better than the stench coming from the bog woman’s head.

As Arthur carefully folded away the part of the scalp covered with hair, something fell out. He managed to catch it in one hand, then made a soft noise at the back of his throat.

“What is it?” Doctor Rosenthaler asked.

“The brain, I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?”

“It doesn’t much look like any of the other brains I’ve seen. It’s much too small. It feels strange, too.”

I’m no doctor, as well you know, Lucy dearest, but it’s impossible not to have picked up a thing or two when living close to Arthur, and I can assure you that the thing Arthur held so gingerly in his hand did, indeed, not look much like a brain. It fit easily in Arthur’s palm and was the same color as a walnut. It was wrinkled like one, too, but threaded through with something that looked like grayish fleshy roots.

“A kind of mold, perhaps?” Doctor Rosenthaler suggested.

“Does mold survive years and years of being submerged in the bog?”

“Perhaps it only started growing after the body was exhumed. Some types of fungi can grow very rapidly.”

“If it’s even fungi,” I said. I didn’t think the doctor’s explanation was very satisfying, and neither did he, but none of us knew enough about mycology to dispute it.

Arthur shoved her brain—or what was left of it, at any rate—back into her head, his face contorted by disgust, then set about sewing her up. Afterward, he scoured his hands with hot water and carbolic soap.

The bog woman currently remains in the cellar until we decide what to do with her.

What am I to make of all this, sister mine? Is this as unsettling to you as it is to me? Because the bog woman’s death and burial, her lack of organs and tongue, her altered brain are unsettling, aren’t they? Or is my mind making morbid what in truth is merely strange? There haven’t been many bodies like this, so who is to say there is even anything unusual going on?

I am trying to calm myself, as you can probably tell. It’s not an easy thing, having a mind that can’t always be trusted. I’ve found myself thinking of Aunt Adelheid a lot these past few days, and I am terrified, more than I can possibly say, that we might share the same fate . Write to me quickly, darling, and help assuage my fears and worries. Better yet: come and visit me soon, that I may hold your hand in mine, rest my cheek against yours, and be comforted by you.

With all my love, always,

Sarah