elle veut ce qu'elle veut
As the day falls into night and the moon rises above the canopy, Nat busies herself with helping everyone unpack their things and get their bearings inside the cabin. She moves coach into the back bedroom, ensuring that the sheets on the rickety old bed are dusted free of decades of cobwebs and nests of bugs, and smooths the mattress out. She clears the pantry, making double sure to remove the mummified mouse that Akilah befriended last time. She even subtly nudges Shauna into sleeping by the fire; it feels like a shot in the dark, but maybe, just maybe, if Shauna is kept warm and well fed, her baby will make it this time.
Of course, the little boy surviving poses a whole new set of problems, a whole new branch of threats. But that’s not hers to deal with right now. She’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
While all of this transpires, Lottie hovers by the windows, her back braced against the thin glass panes. Nat notes how she hasn’t unpacked yet, her bag still zipped at her feet, and thinks of Lottie’s ominous words from earlier in the day.
I want to try something.
Just us.
Nat has no fucking clue what she could mean, except a niggling feeling in the bottom of her gut that feels like the dusty attic and the desiccated corpse of cabin guy. Whatever she’s planning, Nat doesn’t feel exactly confident about it.
“Where the fuck did my gumdrops go?” Jackie’s cutting voice snaps Nat out of her reverie, and she turns her eyes back to the sprawl of girls by the fireplace. Jackie is rifling through her bag, forehead lines knotted together. “Shauna, did you eat my gumdrops?”
Shauna opens her mouth wide, her eyebrows shooting up into her hairline. “Jesus Jackie, no,” she huffs, and Nat can already sense the tension brewing between them. “I don’t even like gumdrops.”
Jackie’s shoulders tense, and she stands up to face the sitting team. “Anyone?” She demands, voice high. “Because I really am hungry-”
Nat swallows and takes a step forward. “I have them,” she admits, and produces the clear bag from her leather jacket pocket. Jackie glowers. “I haven’t-”
“You can’t just go around stealing people’s shit!” Jackie exclaims, and snatches them out of Nat’s hand.
“I wasn’t,” Nat defends. “I was thinking of everyone, Jackie.” Her voice feels strained, tight.
“I don’t think so,” Tai interjects. “You probably just got hungry because all you packed was booze-”
“Hey!” A voice cuts in, and all heads turn. Laura Lee is standing in the hallway, her arms across her chest. “That isn’t true, Tai. Do you guys remember the bottle I gave to Misty to pour on the coach's leg?” She waits for a response. All the girls nod.
“Well, that was Natalie’s,” she explains. “She told me to bring it to you, Misty,” she says, flicking her bright, pretty blue eyes towards the apparent resident nurse. “She was being thoughtful. And I think- I think we all should be grateful for that.”
“Laura Lee is right.” This time it’s Lottie, speaking for the first time in hours. “Nat didn’t take your gumdrops to be malicious, Jackie. She was thinking about rationing. She wanted what was best for us. For all of us.”
Nat doesn’t dare to show it, or even breathe it, but the relief and thankfulness blossoming in her chest is palpable, the warmth working its way into her bloodstream better than whiskey and cigarettes ever could. She knew she’d face backlash for her decisions, for the choices she had made for the team; knew they wouldn’t understand, because how could they? But she hadn’t expected the defense sliding off of Lottie and Laura Lee’s tongues like hot butter. Maybe this won’t be as difficult as she’d feared.
“Look,” Nat finally says, and crouches down to dig other bags of food out of her pockets. “Last night, Lottie and I dug through your suitcases to get as much as we could.” She drops the puny rations onto the floorboards. “It really isn’t much. That’s why I was concerned about rationing.”
The cabin is quiet, save for the crackle of the low fire. She can feel hungry gazes all over her. Can feel the rumbling of stomachs echo in the air.
“What are we gonna do?” Mari suddenly whispers, trembling. “I don’t want to starve.”
Then, Tai. “We’re not gonna starve, Mari-”
“You don’t know that,” says Van, causing Tai to shoot her a look. “You don’t.”
“Van is right!” Misty exclaims tightly. “We could be stuck out here for a while, so we really need to focus on survival skills, like medical training and nursing Coach Ben back to health-”
“Guys, I’m sure they’ll find us soon,” Jackie interjects. “Black box or not. The technology is good, right? Right?”
“Jackie, we’re in the middle of the fucking wilderness!” Curses someone, but Nat can’t even fucking focus amongst the ruckus to discern a voice-
“Everyone shut up!” She snaps. The room falls silent. The drop of a pin would be nuclear. “Nobody is going to starve. Nobody is going to die.” As she says it, she can feel Lottie’s gaze boring holes into the back of her head. “We are going to be fine.”
The room heaves with explosive tension. Nat waits for it to break.
“Natalie Scatorrcio, being all responsible,” Tai drawls, only half-teasingly. “Never thought I’d see the day.” At her words, a wave of giggles ripple across the makeshift bedspreads, each of the girls cracking light smiles.
“I think it’s nice,” whispers Laura Lee mousily. “I think it’s reassuring.”
Nat shoots her an appreciative glance, and ignores the others. She makes a note to thank Laura Lee for having her back when she gets the chance.
“Well, if you ask me,” Jackie mumbles, softer like her usual self. “I think we’re all tired and hungry and exhausted and that we could really do with some sleep.”
A dozen heads bob in unified agreement. Even Nat joins in.
“Yeah, but I can’t sleep if I’m hungry. Now who wants a bedtime snack? Dibs on the corn nuts, though,” Van pipes up, and swipes the crinkled packet from the floor. Tai shoots her a look. “Hey, I’m not going to eat them all.” She pops open the seal, and offers the bag around the room. Fingers scramble for food without hesitation, and Nat inwardly grimaces. Stopping them from scoffing all of the rations is going to be difficult. But hell, she can always go hunting tomorrow. The sooner the better, right?
Nat manages to nibble on a few without letting guilt and worry consume her, and even brings a little handful to Coach Scott, before she settles back onto her shitty makeshift bed. The floor is rougher and harder than her memory serves, and she longs hopelessly for her motel bed in a way she never thought she would. Even a mildewed, ruffled, creaking mattress is better than this shithole. She lies awake for so long that the moon peaks, and its light stops leaking through the glass panes. The fire dies and the darkness is all consuming, blacker than black, and her eyes can barely focus to stare at the moss grown all over the worm-rotted wooden ceiling. The trees outside rustle loudly in the night wind, and everytime a leaf or twig hits the roof she feels her body tense; everything feels like a threat, a danger, a warning.
Everyone else falls into slumber. But not Nat.
She tosses and turns and flips over to face Lottie’s makeshift bed, expecting her to be asleep. Maybe she forgot about her weird plan, whatever the fuck it was. But Nat is met by Lottie’s eyes, deep and brown and seeing and awake, wide open and staring right back.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Lot!” Nat curses, body jumping. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Lottie shrugs. Her blanket is pulled up over the tip of her nose, and all Nat can see is her forehead and big eyes. They’re sparkling a little. A little nervous, too. “Sorry. I was waiting.”
Nat furrows her brows, and rises to lean on her crooked elbow. “For what ?”
“For everyone else to fall asleep,” she replies easily, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. She shuffles up to mirror Nat’s expression, the sheet falling away from her frame. She’s wearing the most pristine pair of silky, pink-and-white striped pyjamas that Nat has ever seen, but somehow they compliment her perfectly, her long black hair tumbling over the collar like night against snow. She must’ve worn these before, Nat remembers, because the sight of her feels fiercely familiar, like she’s had these exact thoughts before.
Nat breaks away from Lottie’s gaze, feeling exposed, and glances around the dark room. “Yeah,” she says, nodding. “Everyone’s sleeping.”
Lottie peels her thin blanket off, and stands up. Nat feels dwarfed by her height. Without a word, she quietly hooks open the pantry door, and starts to ascend the ladder. Nat watches until her feet disappear over the last rung before making a move to follow her.
Upstairs it’s even darker, save for the tiny slither of moonlight bouncing off of the glass of the sole window. The disturbed dust rises in flurries from the creaking floorboards, clinging to Nat’s nostril hairs and tickling her skin. It smells damp, like an abandoned pool, like the stagnant, wet air of an enclosed cave. The putrid stench of mold and stale rot oozes from the corner where the decayed skeleton sits, the body frozen in the chair. Dilute light shimmers across the twisted cobwebs interwoven through his sternum and brittle ribs, the silk shining like silver under the moon.
“Gross,” Nat grumbles, and tiptoes towards him. She hadn’t been the one to find him the first time, nor the one to remove the body; it had been Lottie who found him, and Tai who had disposed of him. She’d only caught flickering glimpses of him then. Up close, she can see why everyone was so freaked out.
She crouches down to carefully extract the rifle from the corpse’s arm. His wrist rattles against the wood of the chair, and she winces. The gun comes away covered in a thick layer of dust, the black barrel tinted white. She swipes it away, and tries not to think about what she was doing the last time she had a rifle in her hands, swallows, and stands back up.
“How do you think he died?” Nat questions, setting the gun down against the floor. Lottie is standing by the window, peering out in the darkness, her body still. She doesn’t turn at Nat’s words.
“Something bad,” she whispers lowly. “Something dark.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Nat drawls. “He’s missing fingers.”
Lottie doesn’t say anything.
“Lottie?” Nat steps towards her. “Why exactly are we up here?”
“I want to try to feel it. Feel him.”
Nat huffs. “You’re talking shit,” she bites. “Lottie, why even try? If you can help it, don’t fucking listen. You don’t have to fucking feel it. It’d be better for you.”
“You don’t understand.” Her voice is dark, flat. “But I don’t expect you to. I have to try this.”
Nat takes a languish breath, and moves to stand by Lottie. Turmoil boils in her gut. On one hand, she knows where believing gets them. Where it got them. The things it made them do.
But another part of her feels wrong for dismissing Lottie. For shutting her down. She should at least try to give her a chance, because she’s only doing what she knows. Sure, she can be difficult. Impossible, at times. But closing the door on the one person who knows what she’s going through right now, this bizarre, terrifying, thing, the one person who is experiencing it too, would be foolish.
“Okay,” Nat finally says with a rush of breath. She steels her features, her limbs, her chest. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
Lottie spins around and shuffles towards the skeleton. She sits down smoothly, kneeling before his bony legs, her hands clasped in her lap. “Just- I want you to watch, Natalie. If I try to hurt myself- like I did last time,” she pauses, and Nat envisions the raised scar on my head, “Please try to stop me.”
After a moment of thick silence, Lottie’s eyelids flutter shut. Her face softens into peace, the tightened lines of her forehead smoothing out. Then, to Nat’s surprise, she reaches out her fingers, slow and steady, and wraps them around what is left of the skeleton’s hand. It’s rather morbid, and Nat feels her stomach flip at the sight.
The quiet suddenly fills with the low murmuring of Lottie’s rich voice. It hums so quietly that Nat can barely discern the words, but they sound foreign; French, she thinks. Just like before, at the seance, except this time the string of sentences are more fluent, continuous, unbroken. She must’ve brushed up on her French in the last twenty-five years.
An involuntary shiver runs through Nat’s body. It sounds quite beautiful on her tongue.
Lottie’s volume picks up, and her body begins to gently rock back and forth. Now louder, Nat can recognise what she’s saying- not translate, just recognise- as the words she said the first time. It’s like she’s trying to recreate the circumstances of the infamous seance.
She rocks heavier, her back swinging, hair sliding across her shoulders and cascading down their blades. Her fingers are twitching against the cabin guy’s bones, the tips flexing, wrists shaking. Then she’s almost shouting, moving with such force that she nearly tips forward into the bones, and then Nat’s behind her before she knows it, her hands on Lottie’s shoulders, body braced heavily around her back.
“Lottie!” She exclaims, shaking her frantically. “Lottie! Lot!”
“Une reine tombera dans le sang. Elle veut ce qu'elle veut! Elle veut ce qu'elle veut!”
“Lottie!” Nat yanks her back, and Lottie tumbles into her lap. Her eyes blink open and they’re huge and terrified and wet, and her shoulders are heaving with gasping, gulping breaths, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat veiled across her forehead. “What the fuck happened?”
Lottie’s mouth trembles. Her throat bobs. Her eyebrows quiver.
“It’s okay-”
“No, Nat. It isn’t okay,” her voice is strained, barely a whimper. “Nothing about this is okay.” Her eyes are brimming with unshed tears. Nat watches, stomach twisting, as Lottie blinks them back.
“What happened?” She shuffles away to let Lottie slide off of her lap and sit for herself.
Lottie swallows. Reaches her hand out to clasp Nat’s palm. It’s the same hand that she gripped the skeletal fingers with.
“I saw something, Natalie.” Her eyes flick up to Nat’s concerned gaze. “I saw you.”
Nat furrows her eyebrows. “Okay…what…what was I doing?”
Lottie breathes heavily. The tip of her nose twitches. “You weren’t doing anything, Nat,” she pauses, and squeezes Nat’s hand. “You were dead.”