Page 7 of Blood on Her Tongue
Chapter 7
But Sarah did not die that day, nor the one after. Arthur gave her some of his blood the same night Michael had; the next day, Lucy donated some of hers, and the day after that, Katje did the same. The blood seemed to do her good. It brought a little color back into her face, which made it look heartier.
Less like the face of one dead or dying, and more like the face I’ve known since the womb , Lucy wrote in her diary. She balanced the book in her lap, wrote with her right hand, and held her sister’s with the left.
She still sleeps most of the time, but Arthur tells me that this is only to be expected with one who is as ill as she is. “It’s not a bad sign, Lucy,” he told me just now. “Her body is fighting the infection and needs all its energy to do it, energy she would otherwise use in being awake. She might yet pull through.”
Dear Arthur! I’ve no doubt he would lie to me if he thought it would spare my feelings. That man lives to be kind. But I don’t think he’d think it a kindness to deceive me about the severity of Sarah’s condition, and if all hope were lost, surely he would not have continued with the transfusions, dangerous as they are?
Oh, but the mind can be such a dark place to be caught up in. If only I could unburden myself to someone other than these pages! But that must never happen again; well I know it. And yet, I can’t help if I sometimes desire for Michael to
“You’ll ruin your eyesight,” a weak voice said.
Lucy sprang up. Her diary fell to the floor, splaying open, bending some of the creamy pages, and her pen rolled underneath the bed, but she didn’t care. “You’re awake,” she said stupidly, pressing her palm against her sister’s brow. It was still warm but no longer searing hot. A good sign. With luck, the fever would soon break completely, and then the worst would be over.
“I’m thirsty,” Sarah said. She was still so weak that she could scarcely lift her own hand. Lucy helped her sit up and held a cup for her, stroking the matted hair at the back of her sister’s head. It was greasy from where it had touched the pillow but strangely brittle and dull everywhere else. There was a smell to it, animalistic. Strands of it came away, which Lucy tucked into her pocket so Sarah needn’t see. Perhaps they should have shorn her head.
Sarah drank quickly, noisily. She finished one cup, then another.
“No more for a few minutes, or you might be sick again,” Lucy said. “Is there anything else you’d like me to get? I could ring for some broth if you’re hungry. I could even toast a bit of bread for you, if you think you could hold it down.”
“Not yet.”
“How’s your head?”
“Better. It doesn’t throb so abominably anymore.”
“That’s good. You seem very lucid today. That, too, is good.”
“Lucid for Lucy,” Sarah joked.
“And the fever hasn’t burned through your terrible sense of humor either. Better and better! I shall have someone fetch Arthur. He’ll be pleased to see you’re yourself again. Michael, too, of course.” She made to move across the room to pull the bell rope, but Sarah gave a little cry and grabbed her hand.
“No!”
“What is it?”
“I…I just don’t want to see anyone but you yet—and Katje.”
“All right,” Lucy said slowly, sinking onto the edge of the bed again.
“It’s because I’m not well.”
“But, Saartje, everyone knows that. You’ve been very ill for over a week now. You had us rather worried.”
Sarah swallowed. Something clicked in her throat. “But I’ll have to put up a brave face for them, Lucy. With you and Katje, I don’t have to pretend.”
Lucy took Sarah’s hand in hers, brought it to her mouth, kissed it. “Do you want me to read to you? I could get a book from your room or one of those treatises you love so much.”
“I just want you to hold me for a while,” Sarah said, so Lucy did. Their hands slotted together as they always had. It felt wonderful to sit like that, not saying anything, just holding each other as they had done even when in the womb, sharing a placenta.
Sarah toyed with Lucy’s index finger, squeezing the joint, bending it. After a while, she asked, “Have I really been that sick?”
“Oh yes. Can’t you remember?”
Sarah shook her head, winced. “My limbs are heavy, I’m dog-tired, my stomach is a sore pit the size of a walnut, and my head feels strange, so I know I must have been, but I don’t remember being sick.”
“What do you remember?”
Sarah’s brow ruffled as she racked her brain. In combination with the pallor of her skin, which spanned across her skull tight as the skin on a drum, this made her look almost ancient. “I was reading a book and making notes in the margins. I already had a headache then, absolutely splitting, so strong that I felt I’d faint. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever had before: It was sharp, like being stabbed. It was persistent and almost continuous. Does that make sense?”
Lucy thought of telling Sarah what she had written in her letter, how she’d thought the bog woman was giving her headaches and was doing things to her brain, but Lucy kept quiet; if her sister didn’t remember, perhaps that was for the best.
Sarah spread Lucy’s index and middle finger out as far as they would go, then snapped them shut. “Initially, the pain was focused in one part of my head, but it began radiating out in tendrils, as if something were digging its roots into my brain. It had also started to affect my vision, like those migraines mother suffered from, but there was no nausea. In fact, I felt ravenous, but I knew somehow that it was imperative I didn’t eat, as if a headache is something you can starve into submission. Well, I was trying to read, but the words danced on the page. I threw my pen down because I couldn’t understand what I was writing anymore, and the pain was such that something had to give, and then I woke up here and saw you scribbling away in your notebook.”
“Nothing in between?”
“Only dark dreams, disturbing but already fading. I believe I dreamed that I bit Arthur.” She laughed at that.
Lucy said nothing, just dropped a kiss on her temple. A chunk of hair had fallen, leaving only the little wisps of baby hair, delightfully soft.
Sarah still toyed with her fingers, gently twisting some of the flesh at the base of Lucy’s ring finger. The frown had crept back onto her face.
“What are you thinking so hard about, hm?” Lucy asked, pressing her free thumb between her sister’s brows to smooth the skin there.
“I feel like I’ve forgotten something important.”
“Any leads? Anything I might do to jog that memory of yours?”
“It was from before I fell sick. I had this realization. It really was frightfully important. I remember my heart beating so fast, the blood pounded in my ears, and it hurt because all sound had started to hurt at that point.”
“Such an exciting discovery, then?”
“No, I wasn’t excited. I was frightened.” Sarah shuddered suddenly, with such force that her elbows drove painfully into Lucy’s rib cage. “Lucy,” she asked slowly, “what book was I reading when I became ill?”
Lucy hesitated, then said, “I can’t know for sure, but on your desk, I found a treatise on ticks you were in the process of annotating.”
“What is the last thing I wrote? Do you know?”
“Just some notes on ticks, Saartje. Nothing special.”
“So you’ve seen it? What did I write?”
A light sweat had sprung up all over Sarah’s body, giving off a slightly sour smell and dampening her nightgown, yet she was cold, not warm. Lucy took her hands and chafed at them to warm them, but Sarah pulled them away and turned so she could look her sister in the eye. “ Tell me ,” she said, emphasizing each word, “what, exactly, did I write?”
“I don’t remember,” Lucy tried, but Sarah saw right through that.
“Don’t lie to me! You don’t know, can’t know, how important it is that you tell me honestly. What did I write?”
Lucy did not look at her sister as she said, “You wrote something next to a paragraph detailing how long ticks can survive without blood. You wrote that, in this, ticks were somehow similar to the bog woman.”
Fear passed over Sarah’s face like a dark cloud. It tightened the muscles in her face. A tendon in her throat stood out like a rope pulled taut.
“Oh, Saartje!” Lucy exclaimed. “Don’t you see it’s nothing but sinister-sounding nonsense? You were already sick when you wrote it. Whatever you think it means, I can assure you it’s nothing of the sort.”
Sarah didn’t seem to hear. “I think she’s inside my head, and she’s eating my brain,” she whispered. She closed her eyes, let out a shuddering breath.
When she opened her mouth, she screamed.
“Get it out!” she wailed. “Get it out, get IT OUT, GET IT OUT—GETITOUT! OH MY GOD, GET IT OUT!” She clawed at her head, driving her nails into her scalp, tearing the skin and ripping out strands of hair.
Lucy clasped her wrists and tried to pull her hands away, but her sister bucked and fought like a demented thing. “Stop it!” Lucy begged. “Please, stop it! You’ll only hurt yourself. You’re frightening me.”
Sarah did not heed her. Lucy didn’t think her sister understood a word she was saying. The whites of her eyes showed. Some capillaries had burst, creating spiderwebs of red that were hair thin but very vivid.
Then while the left eye stayed staring straight ahead, the right eye began to turn away of its own accord. The iris disappeared behind the eyelid, which did not quiver but remained open, the delicate veined skin wadded like a piece of tissue paper, leaving visible only eggshell white threaded with red and pink. When it began to bulge like something was trying to push it from its socket from the inside, Lucy let go of her twin and backed away.
She knew she had to do something, but she was so terrified, she had no control over her body. As she retreated, she tripped over a footstool and fell. She knew, dimly, that her ankles and elbows and wrists should smart, but if they did, she didn’t feel it. She just lay there, staring, feeling like she might die of fright.
Beyond that, she felt nothing at all.
All the while, Sarah kept screaming. The words had slurred into one long ragged howl, deeply animal and unlike anything Lucy had ever heard her sister make before. Her writhing caused her to tumble from the bed, and for a moment, the howling was reduced to a high-pitched wheezing because the fall had knocked the breath out of her, but it soon started up again, unbroken until the point where Sarah stopped clawing at her face and instead began to slam the heel of her hand against her eye.
Whenever her hand connected with her eye, it did so with a horrible meaty sound of flesh meeting flesh— cornea? Jelly? Oh God, what is an eye even made of exactly, and why is hers trying to squeeze out of her HEAD? —that turned the wailing into a low whimper. Soon, there was an awful rhythm to it.
Wail.
Slap.
Whimper.
Wail.
Slap.
Whimper.
Wail…
If you don’t stop her, she’s going to smash her eye to pulp .
The thought came cold and clear, cooling some of the burning fear that still held Lucy enthralled. She staggered to her feet and looked wildly for something she could use to bind Sarah’s hands.
On the bedside table, among the bottles of medicine, the damp cloths, and the half-empty glasses smudged by fingers and lips, she spied a spool of bandages. She had to step over Sarah to get there. Lucy stumbled over one of her limbs and crashed against the table, the edge digging hard into her belly. Her fall knocked over half the bottles and a half-full glass. Water ran over the surface of the table. Breathless, she reached for the bandages, to snatch them out of the way of the liquid.
Her fingers closed around them with a horrible wet crunching.
The screaming stopped.
For a moment, utterly confused, Lucy stared at her hands, at the white strip of fabric that bulged from between her fingers. It was just a spool of bandages. Her hands were fine.
I didn’t make that sound , she realized.
But if it hadn’t been her, then it must have been Sarah.
Shock traveled down her spine with the swiftness of a bucket of water upended over her head, freezing her. She couldn’t turn around. As long as she stayed like this, looking at the puddle of water spread and drip down the table, the fabric of the bandages rough against her palm, whatever had happened hadn’t really happened, because she had not seen it.
But she had heard it, as she heard Sarah now, her sobbing little gasps, all rough and choked and interspersed with moments of nothing. And Lucy smelled this sudden stench of blood mixed with something meaty. Underneath, it smelled slightly fecal.
It took an enormous amount of willpower to turn around and look. When she did, she felt a phantom pain in her head, but it was very soft, almost not a pain but a kind of faintness.
As Sarah had been rolling around the floor, writhing in pain, she must have come upon Lucy’s pen, the one she had dropped when she’d realized Sarah was awake. It was the one Michael had given Lucy for her birthday, made of silver, the tip wonderfully sharp. Sarah had found it, and she had rammed it into her eye, driving it in with such force that only the end was still visible.
The eye itself had burst like a soft-boiled egg.