The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [147]
A muffled squeal. Lisbeth again. “Oh God, I heard something! Was that the door? What are we going to do, Mattie? Broud hears everything.”
“Like your sniveling,” Mattie hissed. “Shut your trap before I do it for you.”
Lisbeth choked on a sob. Her skinny shadow crept away across the room, to a bed on the far side.
Mattie’s eyes glittered in the faint light oozing beneath the door. She was listening. Grace listened, too. Broud was a desiccated old woman whose gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun to display long ears like a donkey’s. And if she heard a noise in the dormitory, she would barge in, flip on the searing overhead lights, and bray like a donkey as well.
Silence. Not even the dry sound of Broud turning the pages of a yellowed volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
And why should I read anything newer? Broud had said once in answer to Grace’s question. Nothing decent has been written in fifty years. Perverts, that’s what authors are today. They spew out filth like a sewer and call it literature. Well, I don’t need Reader’s Digest for that. I can condense it all to a single word, I can.
She never said exactly what that word would be, but Grace had a feeling Mr. Murtaugh knew it.
There was no sound from the other side of the door. Mattie leaned close, her breath hot and sour on Grace’s face. She groped for Grace’s chest, found her nipple, pinched it.
“Nice little tit you’re getting, Gracie. Do they twist it until you scream? Is that when they do it to you?” She pinched harder.
Grace clenched her jaw, willing herself not to cry out. Not so Broud wouldn’t hear. She didn’t care; the old woman’s braying couldn’t hurt her. It was nothing compared to the other things. She just didn’t want to give in to Mattie.
Mattie snorted and let go. Then, in the gloom, Grace saw the other girl make a furtive movement. Mattie’s hand went to her own breast, squeezed. Again.
Grace couldn’t breathe. Didn’t Mattie understand? She reached out a trembling hand and touched the other girl’s arm—
—and in that moment, as if a wire connected them, she felt it. The hatred, the disgust … the yearning. In the last two years they had come for Grace, and Lisbeth, and Sarah Feynman and Nela Barnes. But they had never come for Mattie.
It was as if Grace had stuck her finger into one of the orphanage’s bare electrical sockets. How was she seeing this? How could she know exactly what Mattie was thinking?
But sometimes Grace did know things.
Mattie batted Grace’s hand aside. The wire was broken.
“You bitch.”
Grace knew that word. It sounded like Mattie was crying, but that was impossible.
“You skinny little—” Another word Grace had never heard before. “What did you do to me?”
“You want it,” Grace said, and that time she did whisper, because sickness strangled her. “You want them to come for you. But that doesn’t make you special, Mattie. It makes you …”
Grace could find no word to explain it. Because maybe, in the end, it made you into nothing. Maybe that was the only way you could stand it—to be completely and utterly empty. In the dimness, Mattie’s eyes shone with rage and hurt. And want. Then, with a sound that could have been a snarl or a sob, she slunk back to her bed.
Grace lay back and stared again into the dark. She forced herself to stop thinking. Once upon a time, at night, she would think about the people who might come someday to save them—people from the government. But then one day a man did come, and his eyes had been red and bored, and his suit rumpled and dirty, and Mr. Holiday had showed him around, smiling broadly, ruffling the hair of kids who passed, and the man had made some notes on a clipboard and left. And life returned to normal.
Of course, Grace had learned early on that life at the Home was anything but normal. Normal kids didn’t lie awake at night, waiting for the soft creak of floorboards, and the hands reaching out of the dark.
Except they had come for her less and less of late. Something had begun to change six months ago. She knew it had to do with