Wither (18 page)

“From the day of his birth, I’ve been working tire-lessly on an antidote. I have an ever-rotating medical staff that’s working in a laboratory as we speak. I will find an antidote within four years.”

And if not, then what? I try to fight off a thought that Cecily’s baby will become his new guinea pig after Linden and his wives are gone.

He pats my hand. “My son is going to have a healthy lifespan. And so are his wives. You will have a real lifetime. You’re bringing Linden out of the darkness that Rose left him with, don’t you see that? You’re restoring his life. He’s going to become successful again, and you’ll be on his arm at every party. You’ll have everything you can dream of for years and years.”

I don’t know why he’s saying these things to me, but his presence is starting to nauseate me. Is this a concerned father looking out for his son? Or has he somehow read into my intention to escape? He’s looking right into my eyes and I can’t recognize him. He seems less menacing than usual.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

When our parents died, our basement became hopelessly infested with rats. They were coming up from the sewers and chewing our wires and destroying our food.

They were too smart for the traps we’d laid out, and so Rowan got the idea to poison them. He mixed flour, sugar, water, and baking soda and left it in puddles on the floor. I didn’t think it would work, but it did. While it was my turn to keep watch one night, I saw a rat run in strange circles and then collapse. I could hear its little whinnying noises, could see its feeble twitching. This went on for what felt like hours before it died. Rowan’s experiment was a gruesome success.

Housemaster Vaughn is giving me a choice. Here I can live in this house where he’s dissecting Linden’s dead wife and child for an antidote that doesn’t exist. Here I can die in four years and our bodies will all be experiments. But for four brief years I’ll be the dazzling wife at ritzy parties, and that will be my reward. I’ll still die like the rat, in agony.

I think of Vaughn’s words for the rest of the day. He smiles at me across the dinner table. I think of the dead rat.

But by nightfall, I force Vaughn’s menacing voice out of my mind. Lately I have been promising myself that once I’m in bed, I will think only of my home—how to return to it, and what it looks like. What my life was before coming to this place.

Nobody in this mansion is allowed into these thoughts, except for when I remind myself that Linden, even with his mild manner, is the enemy. He has stolen me from my twin, my home, and he keeps me for his own.

So at night, when I’m alone, I think of my brother, who from the time we were children had a habit of standing in front of me, as though any terrible danger would have to hit him before it could reach me. I think of how looked, gun in hand, after he shot that Gatherer and saved my life; the terror in his eyes at the thought of losing me. I think of how we have always belonged to each other, our mother fitting our young hands together and telling us to hold on.

These thoughts build night after night, when I’m most alone in this mansion of spouses and servants, and for a few hours I’m able to separate myself from this fake life. No matter how lonely it makes me, and no matter how wide and horrific the loneliness, at least I remember who I am.

And then one night, while my mind is fading into sleep, I hear Linden close my bedroom door after coming in. But he’s a thousand miles from me. I’m with Rowan, setting the kite string. My mother’s light laughter fills the room, and my father is playing a Mozart sonata in G major on the piano. Rowan casually unravels the string that’s tangled around my fingers, and he asks me if I’m still alive. I try to laugh like what he’s saying is crazy, but the sound doesn’t come, and he won’t raise his eyes to me.

I won’t stop looking for you, he says. I won’t ever stop. If it kills me, I’ll find you.

“I’m right here,” I say.

“You’re dreaming,” he says. But the voice doesn’t belong to my brother. Linden has buried his face into the curve of my neck. The music is gone; my fingers fumble for string that isn’t there. And I know the truth, that if I open my eyes, I’ll see the dark bedroom in my lavish prison. But I don’t try to free my mind of its hazy state, because the disappointment is too much to take.

I feel the dampness of Linden’s tears on my skin, his shuddering gasps. And I know he has been dreaming of Rose; like me, his nights are often too lonely. He kisses my hair and wraps an arm around me. I allow it. No, I want it. Need it. Eyes closed, I lay my head to his chest for the forceful
thud-thud
of his heart.

I want to be myself, yes. Rhine Ellery. Sister, daughter. But sometimes it’s too painful.

My captor pulls me toward him, and I fall asleep enveloped in the sound of his breathing.

In the morning I awaken to Linden’s breath at the nape of my neck. I’m facing away from him, and he’s pressed to my back with his arms around me. I lie perfectly still, not wanting to wake him, ashamed with myself for my vulnerability last night. At what point does this good wife act stop being an act? How long before he tells me he loves me, and expects me to carry his baby? And what’s worse, how long before I agree?

No. That will never happen.

I try to fight it, but Vaughn’s voice floods into my brain.

You’ll have everything you can dream of for years and years.

I can have this. I can be Linden’s bride, in Linden’s mansion. Or I can run, as far and as fast as I can. And I can have a shot at dying with my freedom.

Three days later, when the next hurricane alarm begins to scream, I break through the screen in my bedroom window.

I just manage to grab on to the tree near my window ledge, and that gives me the leverage to fall into a shrub a few feet down. It hurts, but I’m unbroken. I untangle myself and I run, with the house screaming behind me, and the wind a strange shade of gray. Leaves and hair are in my eyes. I don’t care. I run. The clouds are throbbing.

There are sick flashes of white in the sky.

My sense of direction is gone. All I can see is dingy angry air. And there’s so much noise, and it doesn’t get quieter no matter how fast or far I move. Dirt and bits of grass are rising and dancing chaotically as though enchanted.

I don’t know how much time passes, but I hear my name being cried, once and then several times, like gunshots. And this is right about the time I crash into a giant ice cream cone. The golf course. Okay. I can navigate better now that I know where I am.

I don’t know how far the exit is. I have been to every garden, the golf course, the tennis courts, the pool. I’ve even passed the horse stables, which have been abandoned since Rose’s illness. But I’ve never seen an exit.

I press my body against the giant chocolate scoop as branches fly past me. The trees are waving and howling.

The trees! If I could climb one of them, it would be easier to see farther. There has to be a fence or at least a shrub I’ve never seen before. A hidden door. Something.

One step, and I’m shoved back against the scoop. The air is sucked from my lungs. I drop to the ground and try to turn myself away from the wind so I can breathe, but it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere and I’m probably going to die right here.

I turn, gasping, to the storm. I won’t even get to see the world one last time before I die. I will only see Linden’s strange utopia. The spinning windmills. The strange flashing light.

Light. I think my eyes are playing tricks on me, but the light persists. It spins, shooting toward me and then continuing on its circular path. The lighthouse. My very favorite obstacle because it reminds me of the lighthouses off the Manhattan harbor, the light that brings the fishing boats home. It’s still going even in this storm, throwing its light into the trees, and if I can’t escape, I at least want to die beside it, because it’s as close as I can get to home in this awful, awful place.

Walking is impossible now. There are too many things flying, and I actually think I might be blown away. So I crawl, jamming my elbows and toes into the Astroturf of the golf course for traction. I move away from my name being called, away from that ongoing siren, away from a sudden stabbing pain that hits me somewhere. I don’t look to find out what the injury is, but there’s blood. I can taste it. I can feel it pooling and dripping. I only care about not being paralyzed. I can keep moving, and I do, until I’m touching the lighthouse.

Its paint is chipped; the wood is splintered. Even though I’ve reached my goal, there is something about this marvelous little structure that is telling me I’m not ready to die. To keep going. But there’s nowhere to go.

My hands grope for a solution, for a path up to the light.

I am clinging to a ladder. Not the kind that’s meant to be climbed. It’s clearly for decoration, flimsy and nailed to the lighthouse’s side. But it can be climbed, and my body is able to do it, and so I go. Up and up and up.

My hands are bleeding too, now. Something drips into my eye and stings. The air is being sucked out of me again. Up and up and up.

I feel as though I’ve been climbing forever. All night.

All my life. But I make it to the top, and the light greets me by searing into my eyes. I look away from it.

I almost fall.

I’m higher than all the trees.

And I see it, far, far in the distance. Like a whisper.

Like a timid little suggestion. The pointed flower from Gabriel’s handkerchief, constructed into an iron gate.

It is the exit, miles from me.

It is the end of the world.

And I realize what the lighthouse was trying to tell me. That I am not supposed to die today. I am supposed to follow the path it’s lighting for me—like Columbus with his
Nina
,
Pinta
, and
Santa Maria
—to the end of the world.

The gate in the distance is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

I’m just starting to climb down when I hear my name again. It’s too loud and too close to ignore this time.

“Rhine!”

Gabriel’s blue eyes and his bright brown hair, and his arms that are so much stronger than Linden’s, are coming toward me. Not all of him, not a whole body, but pieces of him, disappearing and flickering in the wind. I see the fierce, angry red of his open mouth.

“I’m getting out!” I scream. “Come with me! Run away with me!”

But all he says is “Rhine! Rhine!” with increasing desperation, and I don’t think he hears what I’m saying.

He opens his arms, and I don’t understand why. I don’t understand what he’s shouting at me until an incredible pain comes crashing to the back of my head, and I’m falling right into his open arms.

The air is still. It’s quiet. I can breathe without the wind to steal air from my lungs. It’s sterile and antiseptic. “Don’t,” I say, or try to say. I can’t open my eyes. Vaughn is here. I can feel his presence. I can smell his cold metal scalpel. He’s going to cut me open.

There’s something warm rolling through my blood. I feel my heart beating with loud, intrusive beeps.

He asks if I can open my eyes.

But it’s the smell of tea that truly rouses me. Despite something telling me it’s not right, I think Rowan is here, and he’s waking me for my shift with a cup of Earl Grey. Instead I’m met with Linden’s eager green eyes.

His lips look redder, cut up, bloody. Strange purple welts make spreading circles on his face and throat. My hand is in both of his, and when he squeezes, it hurts.

“Thank goodness,” he says, and hides his face in my shoulder and convulses with a sob. “You’re awake.”

I vomit, and I’m still gagging when the world goes black again.

I open my eyes many, many years later. The wind is still howling like the dead. It pounds against my bedroom window, trying to break in, to steal me away. I look for the lighthouse gleam, but I can’t find it.

Linden is asleep beside me, his head on the same pillow as mine. His breath against my ear, I realize, is the wind that has been howling in my dreams. There’s a slight wheeze to it.

As I lie here, coming back to myself, I realize that no years have passed at all. His face is still smooth and young, though rather bruised, and I’m still wearing his wedding ring, and I’m still in this centuries-old mansion that will never be blown away.

But there are new strange things to observe also.

There’s a needle jabbing into my forearm, and it leads up to a bag of fluid hanging on a metal rack. There’s a monitor steadily relaying the rate of my pulse. Calm, methodical. I try to sit up and there’s pain in each of my ribs, one by one, like a xylophone breaking as it plays.

One of my legs is elevated on some kind of sling.

Linden feels me stir beside him, and he makes muttering sounds as he awakens. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. I don’t want to see him. It’s bad enough that I’ll have to see him every day for the rest of my life.

Because no matter where I go or how hard I try, I will always end up right back here.

When I can remain comatose no longer, there’s a constant stream of visitors to my bedroom. Linden is always by my side, fluffing my pillow, working on his designs, and reading library books to me. I find
Frankenstein
to be unnervingly ironic. Deirdre, Jenna, and Cecily hardly get more than a few seconds with me before Linden tells them I need my rest. Housemaster Vaughn, the doctor, the concerned father-in-law, gives me a repertoire of what I’ve broken or sprained or fractured. “You’ve really done a number on yourself, darling, but you’re in the best possible hands,” he says. In my medicated delirium he has transformed into some kind of talking snake. He tells me I won’t be able to put weight on my left ankle for at least two weeks, and it’s going to hurt to breathe for a while. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I have the rest of my life to lie in this miserable room and recover.