Chapter 20: Maggie's Madness

20. Maggie’s Madness

If there was anyone who had slept through the events of the night before, who had not been out on the veranda as Michele and I drug our soggy selves back into the house, it didn’t matter. They knew. There was considerable discussion about whether or not I had been involved in the escape attempt, or really just plunged to Michele’s rescue. The former theory was given credence by the fact that many remembered Michele and me sitting together at the same table the day before. Theories, evidence and postulations all bubbled up all around me, while I very determinedly said nothing about the whole mess. I did not know if it was an escape attempt, or some crazy notion to swim in the flooded river in the middle of the night. To me it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we had both gotten out of it alive and no one seemed to have noticed the role of Phyla’s little trick with kudzu vine.

As I was carrying my tray at lunch, Erika came up against me, bumping my arm, but not hard enough to topple the tray. I looked over at her sideways just enough to see Rebecca and Lindsey behind her, flanking her behind and on either side, a royal triad. “If a nig-nog is s’posed to die, it’s usually best to jest let her die,” she whispered to me, hissing between her teeth.

My mouth fell open and I just stood there as they pushed on past me, both Erika and Lindsey giving me little shoves with their hips. Rebecca did not, but she kept her eyes cast down to the floor. Then the three of them marched to a table along the wall and sat down together.

Obviously I was not going to sit with them. I was shaking. Was it fear because there had definitely been a threatening tone to what she had said? Or was it anger that anyone could be so hateful? I took my tray to a small empty table and sat down by myself, but Phyla joined me only a couple of minutes later.

“It looks like you’re now officially an outcast,” she said first thing nodding towards Erika and her cronies.

I looked over at them as well, and of course they had noticed that Phyla had sat with me and were whispering about that. “Do you think they’re dangerous?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Yes. It’s fear that makes the dog bite and that kind of hatred is a manifestation of strangely misplaced fear.”

“So what are they afraid of? Surely not me.”

She plopped down into the chair caddy-corner from mine so that we were both able to keep an eye on the harpies. “I have no idea but it’s not you.” Her eyes flashed over to the them and she asked, ”You don’t mind if I sit with you, do you? You know that they consider me a person of color.” She was smiling a bit about it, and I figured the question was more for show. She must have seen the twinge of excitant that rushed through me at getting to be this close to her again.

“I don’t mind at all,” I answered fixating a challenging stare at Erika and her group. “It seems that my reputation has already been trashed.”

“So why were you out there?”

“Shouldn’t the real question be, ‘Why was Michele out there?’”

There was that same one-shoulder shrug, “Maybe, but only she can answer that one, and she’s locked up for a while now. I want to hear what got you out there.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about that sense that the darkness was lingering somewhere, waiting for me, and I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to talk about the ghosts either. “The door to the veranda was wide open, like someone had totally disabled the alarm and I stepped out there … just to smell the fresh air I guess. And then I heard the screams and went out to the river and saw Michele in the water and I think you know the rest. You were there.”

She slowly chewed a bite of potatoes, and then asked, “But what brought you down there in the middle of the night? To begin with? You know we’re not allowed out except to the bathroom, and they’re picky about even that.”

I took a bite of the beets and chewed it slowly to give myself time to formulate the answer to that one. The tampon story wasn’t going to fly - I wasn’t even sure that Slanick had bought it. Finally, when I had swallowed, I said, “I thought I heard something.”

For some reason Phyla wasn’t going to let it rest, “What kind of something? Do you think you heard Michele yelling?” and then she scooped another forkful of potatoes.

“Okay, it wasn’t so much a sound as a feeling.” I stared off across the cafeteria for a second trying to think of how to say it, but then shook my head when I realized that I was again looking at Erika and her gang. “I get these feelings. You know this house is haunted, don’t you?”

She lifted the one eyebrow and for a second there was a rush, as if I remembered that from somewhere, some time long ago, but then the idea faded as quickly as it had come. “Really? So is this just something that you’ve heard from someone, or have you experienced it yourself?”

I looked over to make sure Erika and friends weren’t evesdropping, and then whispered, “I hear it all the time?”

 “The house?”

“Yes. I hear it breathing. This place … it’s, spooky. It’s alive. It’s … I want to show you something, but let’s finish our lunch and then I gotta watch where Erika goes before I can show you.”

“Okay. Don’t eat the pudding today.”

I tried to do the eyebrow arch back at her, but I don’t think I got it quite right.

“I’ve got a very keen sense of smell. It’s part of being … of being what I am.”

With that reminder I glanced at her ears and realized that they were not at all pointed now, and I wondered if they had become pointed when she did her little plant magic trick with the vine the night before.

We ate the rest of our meal in silence and both of stirred the pudding in with the left-over beets.

After lunch, Phyla went into the stairwell ahead of me, waiting for me partway up the stairs where the camera at the landing couldn’t see her. When I slipped in a few minutes later I gestured for her to follow me on down to the basement.

Phyla walked lightly down the steps, her footsteps so soft that it sounded as if her feet were barely touching the floor, but perhaps that is part of being an elf, something that she doesn’t consider magical at all. At the bottom of the stairwell the steel door once again stood ajar, but the sounds were different. Inside, floating on a waft of musty air, I heard not the whispered voices of Erika and her mysterious lover, but of the ghosts. They were moaning in pain this time, and crying in sorrow. We slipped on in.

Above us the very living sound of footsteps, the girls headed up to naptime to sleep off their drugged chocolate pudding. They walked on new floors laid onto joists above us, thick dark wood, nearly two centuries old, creaking a bit. Everywhere around us there was the smell of old, musty, dusty and damp.

Then I saw him. The man I had seen on my previous trips, chained to the stone wall and crumpled into the dark liquid of his own blood and piss. It had made me vomit once, but now I knew to expect to it, to know that it was not now, but a picture from the history of the house. Behind him stood the topless woman, blood trickling from one of her breasts, her hand to her mouth, tears streaming down her face, not from her own pain, but from what had been done to the man in front of her.

And there on the floor the girl sat, huddled against the wall. This time I could not see her face, but on her naked back I could see the streaks where a whip had been applied to her as well.

Their sorrow closed in on me and felt like it was crushing my chest. “Do you see them?” I whispered to Phyla, who was standing so close that I could feel her brushing my arm.

“No.” She answered. “See what?”

“Ghosts. That man lying there. The woman. Can you hear them?”

She shook her head slowly while looking all around the cellar, the shelves, the floor joists above our heads where the shuffle of feet was quieting.

I felt the tears forming in my eyes. I didn’t know if it was because I felt overwhelmed by the pain that these ghosts had been living with for more than a century and a half, or because Phyla, this amazing woman I had fallen in love with, couldn’t see them. Perhaps she would think I was making all of this up, that I was trying to play some kind of a game on her. I reached for her hand, but she didn’t notice and was just out of reach, so I grabbed nothing but air.

I think that she was trying to listen, trying to see, but finally she said, “You know, this is a really creepy place - it’s no wonder it has ghosts. And I’m really not an underground kind of person.”

“So you can’t see or feel anything?”

“No. But I can feel that it’s a really creepy place, and let’s get out of here.” Now finally she reached for my hand and I felt a wave of gratitude sweep through me with her touch. “You nearly died last night. Let’s just use this time for us. I mean, I almost lost you, and I need … something.” With her other hand she reached over and brushed my cheek.

As much as I wanted her to see and to understand what I was seeing about the house, I also felt a need to touch and to be touched, to be close the way we had been the day before. I told myself I had earned all of that for myself after what we had been through the night before. And I told myself that I owed Phyla something for the little trick with the vine that had made all the difference when Michele and I fought the gushing water.  ”Okay,” I said, “Let’s go.”

She took my hand and pulled me back out of the basement and on up the stairs. I dropped her hand when we passed the camera on the first floor landing and then fell a few steps behind her as she led us on up, past the second and third floors to the smaller door into the fourth floor hallway.

As we walked down the narrow hall towards our leather couch, we came to a massive puddle on the floor and some vomit in the corner. I wanted to turn around and go back downstairs, perhaps tell someone. From the odor I guessed that the puddle was urine even if the smell of the vomit was stronger. But Phyla pulled my hand and led me along the wall, around the puddle. “Come on. Just a few minutes.”

“But shouldn’t we let someone know, so they can clean this up?”

She shook her head, “And let everyone know that we have been coming up here? They’ll find it when they bring the food up or something. Someone always brings Maggie’s meals up to her. Let them deal with it.”

At the end of the hall we knelt on the cushions of the old leather couch, and looked out the window, her arm around my waist. I leaned my head into her shoulder, and watched the slow trickle of drops from the rain worm their way down the wavy old glass of the window, as the wind rattled a loose pane.

I remembered that the night before I had had a thousand questions for Phyla, about us, about this mysterious history that we had together. What was it like to be an elf, and what all could she do with her gift for plants? And for that matter, what was I? I had been a spider under the microwave, but there had obviously been a me before that. Was I some kind of magical creature? The only thing I could remember ever doing was repelling the darkness that night in James’s room, and that hadn’t ended so well. And did that even count as magic? Or was I just being a bitch?

And then, thinking about the darkness, it occurred to me that I could ask Phyla about that as well. Maybe it was something that had followed me from our shared past. But then, if she couldn’t see the ghosts would she be able to see or at least feel the darkness if it came again. Could it be that elves were so locked into their plant world that they couldn’t sense the other world? Or could it be that the darkness, and maybe even the ghosts, lived only inside me, that they were manifestations of something that in me? Mental illness perhaps? Schizophrenia?

I wanted to ask her so many things, but then she turned towards me and kissed me. Gentle at first but then more insistent, rolling me over so that the back of my head was resting on the back of the couch, my crown pressed against the window. I was sitting on my feet with my knees on the couch cushion sideways and twisted so that my shoulders were against the back of the house. Her face was above me, pushing down with a full-on passionate kiss, her tongue tracing my lips.

“Ah-humm,” we heard from behind us.

Phyla rolled off of me and so that we were both facing towards the hallway we had just come through. Before us stood a mousey girl with light brown hair that has disheveled itself into spikes and tangles, and steely blue eyes that jerked back and forth, as if she couldn’t quite control them. Her body was as tight as a spring, quivering. She wore a green nightgown with faded yellow flowers which came to just about her knees, and over that an institutional grey robe which hung open and unbelted. Dried food was splattered down the nightgown, and her legs were even hairier than mine.

“Not s’posed to be here!” She said loudly, shaking. I could see the anger swelling up through her and the way she was pulling in a massive voice, ready to scream, a scream that would surely give us away. At the same time it was like she wanted the sound to form but it wouldn’t come.

The scream was stopped by Phyla’s calm voice saying, “But Maggie, we’re nice.”

“Nice?” Maggie looked perplexed, as if the word was something she hadn’t heard in a long time.

Phyla nodded her head. “You can come sit with us, if you like.”

“But you guys are.” She squeezed all four of her fingers in tight to her thumb on each hand, and then tapped her hands together. Two things coming together – a motion that indicated kissing perhaps, or maybe intercourse.

“Yes, we are,” Phyla answered in that same calming voice. “Because we love each other. But you can still come sit with us. We won’t hurt you …”

“I don’t kiss.” I had expected her to finish the sentence by saying that she didn’t kiss girls, but maybe she had meant to end it there, to say that she didn’t kiss anyone.

“Kissing can be nice, but we won’t try to kiss you. You can just sit here with us, and then my friend and I, we’ll kiss more later. Would that be okay?”

It seemed to be a lot of words for her to process. She was still shaking.

Phyla nudged me and we scooted apart to make room for her in the middle. Still, I was surprised when she turned around and plopped down on the couch between us. She smelled of BO, worse than I had I had ever smelled in my life, but her skin was warm where a bared shoulder brushed against mine. That little bit of contact seemed to be enough to calm her some. The shaking quit for a minute of silence, but then it began with her eyes focusing out into the hallway.

I looked where she was staring and I saw it, the darkness looming, taking shape near the ceiling of the alcove. Something kicked in within me, much as it had in James’s room those many weeks before. A growl fluttered up from my belly and through my throat and I thrust my hand out as if I could blast it with some type of a force field. The shapeless creature retreated and faded until there was only water-stained ceiling and bits of peeling wallpaper.

Maggie looked at me, her quiver having quieted and then asked Phyla, “She can do that?”

“Yes. Sometimes. She has tricks, but she needs to know they don’t always work.” She looked at me with a look that I couldn’t decipher, unsure if it was a question or a warning.

There was another long silence as if Maggie needed to process that little piece of information before saying, “Cool.” Then she surprised me when she when she turned her face towards me and buried it into my shoulder, whimpering like a lost puppy.

I didn’t quite know what to do with my right arm, but after about half a minute I put it around her shoulder and pulled her to me. She smelled of urine and old cafeteria food, refried beans and mystery meat, and of course that body odor - a rich montage of vile fragrances.

The soft sounds of Holshue House crept up through the floor, the banging of pots in the kitchen, the squeaking of cart wheels in the second floor hall. But we sat in silence as Maggie’s gradually settled down. Her filthy nightgown, visible in her still open robe, had ridden up and revealed just enough hair between her legs to suggest that she was probably not wearing underwear. But there was nothing erotic about that. I thought of an expression I had heard my mother use once or twice, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and wondered if I was on a path to become this before I discovered Phyla. Had she saved me from this?

Finally Phyla, who was snuggled against Maggie’s other hip, asked, “Maggie? Why did you piss all over the floor?”

There was another long period of quiet, leading me to believe that Maggie was simply not going to speak any more. But then she said, “Because I didn’t have enough throw-up.”

I could almost feel Phyla grinning, as if this was going to turn into a game. “Okay. Why did you throw up on the floor?”

This time the answer came more quickly, “To get him out … him out … him out.” She started rocking back and forth a little bit.

I decided that it was my turn to participate in this. “The dark shape that we saw? You threw up to get him out?”

“No.” I looked at her face. She was staring off into nothingness and and biting her lower lip. “He said if I tell he will send me back to that other place, that place that is not this place. I can’t tell.”

Phyla let out a long breath, “But you can tell us. We won’t tell anyone.”

“No. Can’t tell.”

“Maggie,” I began, “if you can keep our secret, we will keep yours.”

Again, there was more biting of the lip before she answered. “What secret?”

“It’s a secret that Phyla and I kiss. That we make each other feel … you know. Phyla said we could trust you.  Now you can trust us.”

Phyla reached for her hand, the one on her side, “Remember pinky promise? Did you do pinky promise when you were little?”

“Yes,” Maggie answered with uncertainty.

Phyla hooked her pinky into Maggie’s and nodded at me to do the same. I did, with her other hand. Then she reached across our crazy new friend with her other hand, pushing her left pinky towards me, asking me to grab it with my right. I did that as well. “See,” she said, bringing her face close to Maggie’s, “we have made a promise circle, and a circle is the strongest thing there is. So now it’s okay to tell because we can never tell. It would break the circle.”

 “Okay,” she answered slowly. “Him, the one who brings up the food, he does things … to me … and I don’t like it. But if I push, push, push away, he ties my hands and I can’t push. I don’t like it. It makes me throw up. I throw up in the hall so he has to clean it. It makes him mad, but I don’t care.” And then she got quiet again, retreating to her quiet distant place.

“Fuck,” was all that I could say.

Phyla looked across her at me and shook her head. “It’s okay. Maggie. We will keep your secret. The circle. Remember.” Then to me, “We need to get back downstairs, before someone notices that we haven’t gone to our rooms for nap time.”

I nodded, although it felt so wrong to be abandoning her right after what she had just told us. But if we were caught the “staff” who were really guards in disguise, would likely cut us off to all access to this place, and to Maggie.

“We’re going to walk you back to your room now, okay?” Phyla said.

Maggie didn’t really respond, but didn’t resist when we pulled her to her feet.

At her door Phyla whispered to her, “Remember. It’s a pinky promise circle.” Maggie closed the door on her dark hole of a room, and I felt tears stinging my eyes.

There is only the one stairs that goes up to the fourth floor, but there are two that go between the rest of the floors. At the third floor landing, Phyla pulled me to a stop and said, “Go through the third floor and down the other stairs so the hallway cameras on our floor don’t catch us coming from the same direction.” She smiled at the cleverness of her little plan, and then gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

But I grabbed her sleeve and shoved her back into the corner of the landing, well out of sight of the camera. “Wait,” I said with an urgency and force that surprised myself. “You have to tell me about the darkness, that whatever that I chased away up there. Can you see it, even though you said you couldn’t see my ghosts in the basement?”

Phyla smiled, “Yes. Garish is not a ghost, and I can see him, perhaps even better than you can.”

“Well, what is he?” I emphasized the last word because I had thought up to this point of the darkness as an “it.”

“We don’t have time to talk about it. Just know that your little trick isn’t always going to work, and if his friend, Throttle is with him, it probably won’t.”

“What are you talking about? What are they?”

“It is still better if you remember all of that on your own if you can, and … we don’t have time to talk about it. Now go to the other stairway and down, and I’ll talk to you later.” She gave me one more quick kiss on the lips, and then floated on down the steps, again walking almost without any sound of footsteps.

On my way through the third floor hallway on my way to the other staircase I came past Michele’s room. I knew it was locked, that inside she was quietly enduring her punishment. Suddenly I realized that I had really had no idea why she had done what she had done, how the alarm was deactivated or if she had gone into the river on purpose or not.

I also realized how totally exhausted I was and once I was back in my room I nearly slept through the back to classes bell.