Chapter 37
When Dani stirs, she finds that she does not wake in her bed.
This is the first mistake.
She feels the panic settling in as she recognizes the room surrounding her. It isn’t Viola’s room, which would also cause panic, but of a different sort. Instead, Dani finds herself in her room at Bly once again. Standing, she recognizes the crack along one of the panes filled in with some sort of metallic fixture and places her hand along it, rubbing her thumb along the thin veining. She hasn’t been here in…in years.
As Dani brushes her thumb along the crack, it throbs beneath her touch and seems to glow. She doesn’t remember that happening. Her eyes narrow just as she begins to hear a knocking noise—
“Miss Clayton?”
Dani turns.
Behind her, Miles tosses an apple up in the air and catches it, easily enough. His eyes are dark, and he wears his newsies cap at the slightest of angles. There’s a bite missing from the apple. His head tilts as he stares at her. “Is something the matter?”
Dani turns back, but the window is gone, replaced with trees and, if she looks far enough, the outline of a stone well. Hannah Grose’s body is within it, she thinks. Isn’t that right? Her eyes narrow as she stares into the woods. No, that can’t be right. She just saw Mrs. Grose this morning. She can’t be dead at the bottom of the well. That would mean that Dani has been seeing—
There’s a sharp pain at the base of her skull, and she presses her fingers to it. They’re cold. She feels hot. Something tells her there should be another, less painful, but no less unsettling feeling to accompany that one – she should feel something traveling up the center of her skull and coming to rest just between her eyes. She should—
“Miss Clayton?”
Miles, again, and this time, when she turns, he seems to be concerned. “Are you ill? Do you need to take a day? Miss Jessel always made us take a day when we felt ill, so you should take one, too, if you’re feeling out of sorts.”
“Mm, no.” Dani gives her head a little shake, as though to right herself. She doesn’t feel quite right here. Something feels wrong. She can’t put her finger on what. “I’m just a little confused. Like when you’re having a very bad dream.” The words leap to her lips unbidden, and she finds herself saying them before she even thinks them quite through: “I’m having the strangest dream.”
It’s the words that reveal it to her, that take that sharp tingling spike in the base of her skull and connect it to something she once knew. Dani’s eyes widen, and her gaze moves past Miles to the lake far behind him. “Excuse me.” She places a hand on his shoulder and pushes past him.
Miles calls her again – “Miss Clayton?” – but she ignores him. He isn’t real. None of this is real.
Dani storms to the lake, only calming – to an extent, she’s still furious – when she sees Flora. The young girl had been near the lake more than the rest of them had, mostly as a sort of warning. She hadn’t known then why she’d needed the caution; she does now. As she approaches, Flora turns to her, a small bundle of picked flowers in one hand. “Good afternoon, Miss Clayton. Have I done something wrong?”
“No, Flora, you haven’t done anything wrong.” Dani kneels in front of her so that she can be at Flora’s eye level. She places a hand on her shoulder. “Can you go inside and help Owen? I heard that he was planning on baking some cookies, and he wanted a helper.”
Flora’s eyes light up, and she beams. “That would be perfectly—” She is cut off by something, and her gaze flicks back to the lake. There’s nothing there. Or – there is something there, but it is revealed only to her, not to Dani at all. She turns back. “Will you be coming with me, Miss Clayton?”
Dani hesitates. She doesn’t let her gaze flick to the lake as Flora’s does – it isn’t the lake either of them care about, and she doesn’t know how much this Flora knows. Everything she had known at Bly, certainly, but Dani’s own, current situation? Likely not. The real Flora would have known. This is not the real Flora.
“I have to find Miles,” Dani lies, keeping herself from looking over her shoulder where she hopes he doesn’t suddenly appear. “Don’t you think he’d want to help, too?”
Flora glances over Dani’s shoulder and then back to Dani. She nods once, and the smile returns to her face. “Just don’t go in the lake,” she whispers, like it’s a secret. “There’s leaches and all sorts of perfectly horrible things in there. It isn’t fit for swimming.”
“Of course not.” Dani smiles. She pulls at her pants, her soft pink shirt. “I’m not really dressed for swimming anyway, am I?”
“No, you’re not.” Flora places her bundle of picked flowers just at the edge of the lake and heads off toward the manor.
Whether or not she will actually meet a version of Owen there is beyond Dani’s knowledge of the situation. In fact, Dani thinks if she went with her, she would run into a version of Jamie who was like and unlike the one she knows best. That would be a problem. She could be so easily distracted.
Once Flora is far enough away, Dani begins to storm into the lake, muttering under her breath, “Stupid centuries old ghost. Can’t even tuck me away right.” Her teeth grind together. “I’m not supposed to know what’s going on, Viola. You obviously haven’t practiced.”
Well – of course, Viola hasn’t practiced. It’s clear to Dani then that whatever Viola did to her before is nothing like what she is doing with her now. She hasn’t been tucked away before, not quite, not like this. That doesn’t make her feel better. It might have, if she’d known earlier, but finding out while she is clearly being tucked away isn’t a good feeling. Being here, in this artificial past, doesn’t feel right.
At all.
The further Dani gets into the lake, the less she is able to walk. She wades until she needs to swim, and then she swims. It all feels real. She hates that. It isn’t real. The question is – if she doesn’t remember swimming to the center of the lake while at Bly, will it really be as it once was? Or will it only be what her mind believed it was?
Dani takes a deep breath. Time to find out.
As she dives beneath the surface, Dani keeps her eyes open. This is the second mistake. Before she can even try to find Viola, she sees the bloated, rotting corpse of Peter Quint. She’d been graciously absent when they drained the lake and found the skeletons before, instead spending her time with Jamie and dealing with that beast crawling about in the back of her skull. That absence doesn’t serve her well now.
Seeing his body – the flesh thickened with water, with bits and pieces missing where the fish have nibbled on his skin, one eye missing and the other torn out of its socket, floating but unable to get away from his skull, his skin a mottled blue grey beneath the green and brown of the water around her – Dani recoils. She swims away out of habit, without thinking, and as she does, the corpse seems to laugh—
“Poppins?”
Dani stares, shocked, past Jamie. She takes a deep breath. He isn’t there. He isn’t there. And yet, peering past her in the green house, she can just make out the glint of light on glass, the thick mop of black curly hair. She sits where she is and takes another deep breath, glances to Jamie and then back again. The image is gone. He’s gone.
“I’m sorry,” she mutters, fingers tangling in on themselves where they rest in her lap. “I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s—”
Something is wrong.
She’s done this before.
Dani feels a sharp pang in the base of her skull. That’s familiar, too, but it’s wrong. It’s new, and that makes it wrong. She glances up at Jamie. “Have we…has this happened before? I feel like this has happened before. You kissing me, and my being afraid, and you being upset with me.” Her eyes narrow, and she searches her hands, unable to meet Jamie’s eyes. “I feel—”
Jamie reaches out and tucks errant strands of hair behind Dani’s ear. “You got it right already,” she says, and her head tilts at an awkward angle. “You’ll get it again. Let’s enjoy it a bit first.”
“Enjoy?” Dani echoes, looking up, confused. “I’m not sure what you—”
Jamie leans forward and kisses her again, and Dani really stops thinking about all of that. Something’s wrong. This is wrong, but this is also right, and she’s wanted this for long enough that as long as Eddie doesn’t show up again, as long as she can force herself to relax, she’ll be okay.
She can be okay, can’t she?
Maybe it’s time to move on.
This is the third mistake, and her mind can only take so many before it succumbs.
You are determined to go see this therapist as soon as you can, and you are determined to use maps to make your way there. Jamie will, of course, notice that you are the one controlling your host’s body, but multiple factors are in your favor: 1) Jamie woke on the couch and barely made her way into their joined room, except to place a kiss on your host’s forehead, and 2) your host normally slumbers past the time that Jamie leaves in the morning – not because she wakes so late but because Jamie wakes so early. Once she has left, you make your way out of your host’s bed, over to where you know they have kept their maps stashed away in hopes of a future journey outside of Vermont. They took many journeys and had many adventures prior to settling down here, so it stands to reason that in the future, maybe, they will take others.
There is the plan to visit Owen, too, but you believe that is of a different sort than their exploration of the United States, a country which hadn’t even existed when you were alive. And yet, here it is. So many things are so different.
This is another thought for another time.
You follow your finger along streets and routes, finding the easiest path to the city where the Lundy woman dwells. It isn’t far at all, for a time when cars exist – and wouldn’t have even been far by horseback or carriage. This should be fine. You will be fine, so long as you can figure out the bus routes.
Someone overconfident might consider this as not a problem, but you don’t. This is new territory. The bus might be difficult. You won’t know until you try it, and you are determined to try. That, at least, is something you can do.
You are not quite prepared for the experience of riding a bus. Although your host has certainly been in automobiles before, that was primarily before you’d paid more attention, so it is an entirely new experience for you. Add to that all of the people on the bus with you, sitting so close to you, next to you – you feel a little overwhelmed. There are so many people. You have never really been around this many people. It helps, however, that most of them aren’t paying attention to you. They’re just…there. Like figure pieces in those shows your host and her partner follow, like background characters on a stage. Not really there to speak with or hold your attention. Just…accessories.
Of course, you must be the same to each of them. A background character in their life, not a main player. That’s a relief. They likely do not know your host, and they don’t know you. You could be anyone to them, and whoever you are, they will likely forget you within moments of leaving, unless you do something extravagant.
That makes the ride easier. You’re real, each of you, but none of you care about each other. As soon as a seat near to the window opens up, you take it and stare out on the world as it passes you by. There is so much you haven’t seen, and you take it all in. The world is warm and real and just beyond your reach.
You could take it, if you wanted. Leave your host tucked away as she is now, doing whatever it is that she is doing – you cannot feel her the way that you normally can when you’ve taken over her body and she’s awake – and she must be awake by now—
It doesn’t matter. Whatever she’s doing, she isn’t interfering with you, she isn’t complaining or yelling or beating down the door to your room, she isn’t staring in on how you are acting and judging you for not being what people nowadays consider normal. You feel free, almost.
Free and wrong.
And alone, as you have been for as long as you can remember. This is less new.
You move from one bus to the other, and it’s…easy. Too easy. Maybe that is what feels wrong about all of this. (Maybe it’s that you should be able to hear your host and interact with her. You miss the contact, even if it’s negative more often than not, even if it would be especially negative now. Whatever this is, you do not like it. But this must be what your host wants – her body back, like this, without having to worry about interference from you. Perhaps, if you were used to it, you would want it, too.)
It takes a little longer than your host might have expected, but significantly less than you had. You forget just how fast the automobiles are in contrast to the carriages of your time, and so you get there with what you guess is more than enough time to spare. The bus doesn’t drop you off at the address on Dr. Lundy’s card, of course, instead on one of the bigger streets nearby, but with your map in hand, you find the address easily enough. The way the address is penciled in on the back of the car suggests that maybe it isn’t normally intended to be there, but you are not concerned about that. No one’s situation can be as weird as your own – not that Emilio could have known that.
But the building looks less like a clinic or business or whatever it is that therapists might use in this day and age and more like a normal house. It’s two stories tall with a darker frame and lighter walls, almost more like the cottages that you’ve seen in the children’s books you’ve read at the library than a house that someone might actually live in. Or a witch’s cottage. Emilio wouldn’t have sent you to a witch.
You make it to the front door and knock twice. There’s a little rectangle with a white circle in the middle that makes you think maybe you should press that instead, but you don’t know what it is or what it might do. Knocking is certainly the better option.
It takes a few minutes. More than a few minutes. It’s a long stretch of not silence. There isn’t really any silence in the real world the way that there is in that jungle on your side of the rusty gate. There are birds here, landing in one of the trees in the yard and tweeting gently as it makes its nest. There’s a wind rustling the branches and leaves against each other. There’s something that you can’t name that zooms overhead, enough to make you jump in surprise—
And just at that moment, the door opens with a long creak, just like you imagine the door to a witch’s cottage might. You turn to see a girl who looks not much older than Luisa standing just inside, one hand on the outside of the door, barely opening it, and staring out at you. “May I help you?”
You pull the card out, flip it to the other side, examine the address again, and then glance at the girl. “Are you Dr. Lundy?”
The girl’s eyes narrow. “Appointments and sessions are held on the phone, not in person.” She gives you a rough look over. “Who are you?”
“I’m Viola.” You search about in your mind for another name but still cannot find one. You must have had another name, just like Dani does, but you still can’t remember it. Your memories have been coming more and more, but that is beyond them. You take a deep breath, push a hand through Dani’s blonde hair, and then kneel before her. “Emilio sent me. He thinks I’m Danielle – Dani – Clayton. He thinks we both are.” You press your lips together. If your host were here, she would say not to explain anything, not to a stranger, not to a child.
And yet something in her compels you to trust her.
“Are you twins?” Dr. Lundy asks, staring at her. “You don’t need therapy for that.”
“Not exactly.” You cannot explain things as exactly as you want, but you try anyway. “Dani’s in here.” You tap your forehead, trace your fingers along your skull, and then tap that spot where it meets your spine, just between the two muscles. “She’s locked away right now. She will be upset with me, but we needed to see you.”
Dr. Lundy gives you a look – strong, for someone as young as she appears. But you know all about appearances and how they do not always give the full truth. They don’t speak the truth about you, and this girl….
She is the same as you. Must be. Emilio wouldn’t trust her otherwise.
After another long moment, Dr. Lundy steps back, holding the door open wide. “Come in,” she says. “Let’s have a chat, the three of us, and see if we can get some things straight.”
You nod once and follow her inside.