The Body Read online

  "No! No! Don't do that," Petra sobbed.

  As Lara approached Tanya, she heard the pages of books sliding against each other.

  "All those books and you haven't learnt a thing," Lara said.

  Like Petra's tea cups, the books were technically more akin to decoration than the structure, and yet they were all so very proud of their prisons and their adornments, as if they were a part of the magic, though it was, in fact, a borderland of true power and superstition.

  With one mischevious finger, Lara tugged a large, leather-bound tome from a shelf at head height and let it fall to the floor where it slapped the boards face down.

  "Lara, don't."

  "Now that's enough!"

  Jocanta groaned, knowing that she was next.

  They all watched in terror as the whirlwind of destruction picked up speed before them. Lara set her stool on the floor not far from the door and then bent down at Jocanta's front right leg, careful not to touch the chest at all, and she tugged at something. She was down there for quite some time, pulling and twisting and shoving and pinching, because she refused to lift the chest with one hand. She hadn't felt any negative charge from the stool, but she might not be so lucky with other, inhabited items.

  When Lara finally stood, she was holding a small cube of wood, cheap pine, about an inch and a half tall.

  "There," Lara said.

  Jocanta's chest was perfectly level, but only through force of will. She didn't want to topple over in front of the others, and so she was using all her power to remain upright.

  "What about me?" Anna said, trying to be brave in the face of Lara's approach.

  Lara stared at the chair as though Anna herself were sitting in it.

  "It's too late for you," Lara said. Her heart wasn't in it though. She hadn't decided what to do with her Anna. She hadn't really decided to do any of this, but she hesitated now, her happily malevolent flow interrupted, because Anna was the only person in the room she'd miss.

  In order to stay strong in front of the others, mostly Imelda, Lara stirred up her memories of past interactions with Anna that had been less than satisfactory. There were many of those actually. Lara admired her, but she hadn't ever been very likeable. It was impossible for her to like someone who was nice in one moment and then turned on you in the next.

  She brought bad memories to the surface and watched them thrash around, bloody and blue, until she was able to open her mouth and the words flowed again, as they had for the others.

  "You laughed at me one too many times, Anna," she said. "You looked down on me, just like the others, and you never listened to what I had to say."

  "It wasn't kind, but you can't kill someone for laughing at you," Anna said.

  "I'm glad you didn't try to deny it."

  "I know who I am," said Anna. "Do you?"

  "I know what I have to do," she said.

  "Lara. Please."

  Lara said nothing, but she knew that she might spare Anna. In her fantasy, when she was finished with everyone else and the room was nothing but ash and smoke, she'd sit in the rocking chair and contemplate what to do next."

  Last of all was Imelda.

  Lara saw herself in her mirror and, as expected, she saw herself reflected as not only old before her time, but haggard. Her hair was a bird's nest and her eyes were as black as volcanic rock. When she smiled, defying her false appearance, she saw that Imelda had presented her with rotting, black teeth.

  "I was going to destroy my stool," Lara said. "I was going to go away and leave you all in peace, but you've forced me to think otherwise. You all agreed that I would never have any peace, and in that case, I'm going to have to get rid of you.

  "When I do it, Imelda, and it will be soon, I'm going to save you until last, because all this was your fault and I want you to watch. I'm going to take the axe and I'm going to smash it into your marble top."

  No reaction.

  "I'm going to crack it right down the middle ... And then I'm going to smash your glass. "

  "One good swing should do it," Imelda advised.

  "... to begin with."

  Lara stared at her, eyeing the drawers and the marble surface, but trying to keep her eyes from engaging with her hideously distorted reflection in the mirror.

  "You might think differently in the morning," she said.

  Despite all Imelda's tact and restraint, Lara thought that she detected menace in her tone.

  "She'll run," Petra said. Her tremulous voice was barely a whisper in Lara's mind, but the woman wouldn't normally have said anything of the sort. She'd been emboldened by her horror at Lara's intention to glue a dead animal to her shelves.

  "She'll run away tonight," Tanya agreed, sounding panicked.

  Lara's fingers were tight around the leg of her stool. She'd been planning to destroy the stool and then go back to bed with Roger, but now she feared closing her eyes, even to blink, in case one of them, most likely Imelda, tried to perform a psychic attack. She would be most vulnerable, of course, when she was unconscious. Perhaps being down the hall was not far enough away and Imelda was more powerful than she'd been letting on.

  "Go and sleep on it," Imelda said, near-confirming her fears. "When you're in a calmer frame of mind, we can talk then."

  She'd broken so many rules that Imelda had discarded them too. The battlefield for the body would be as bloody and underhand as necessary. If that meant pouncing on her mind while she slept and ripping her out of the body, they'd do it.

  "Before I sleep," Lara said, "I'm going to have to destroy you."

  "Oh?" said Imelda. Then she made a sound like the last of her laughter being wrung from her throat.

  "I'm going to do you first as an example to the others."

  "And how do you propose to achieve this, Lara?"

  "I told you," Lara said. "I'm going to smash you in with an axe."

  "You'll wake Roger," Imelda said.

  There was that, but there was no way she could back down now, not with all the others watching her, wanting the body back. The only way to gain dominance over them would be to strike down their leader. It would also be the only way to stop her feeling so terrified that something bad was going to happen. She had to make it happen and be in charge of it.

  "You'll be needing that axe then," Imelda said. "Are you going to ask the neighbour? I'm sure it's only one o'clock in the morning!"

  "We have an axe," Lara said.

  "Oh, I know," Imelda snapped. "And I know where it is, because I put it there. Do you know where it is?"

  "Yes."

  "Go and get it then," Imelda snapped.

  Lara tried not to let the flicker of doubt show on her face. She didn't glance at Imelda's mirror in case she saw something that sapped what remained of her strength and she'd need every bit of it if she were to follow through on her threat.

  "Why did I ever mention the axe?" she thought to herself. "Why did I have to threaten them? Why couldn't I have just suffered until morning to fetch the stool and then this would never have happened?"

  "Get going then," said Imelda. "My marble top is not going to cleave itself, is it?"

  The half of the room that was not quivering in silence chuckled at this. Lara felt them goading her and in terms of the power dynamic alone, backing down now seemed not only unbearable but unwise. Those that were quivering had already lined up behind those that were loudest, with Imelda at the front, seemingly waiting for her moment to pounce.

  Lara reminded herself that she hadn't done so badly so far. She had a husband, a future and a mind and body to explore them with. All she had to do was keep going and she'd be free of her sisters too.

  "Yes, why wait?" Lara said brightly and she turned on her heel to fetch the axe from the shed.

  There was whispering as she left the room. She couldn't make out the words, only the sentiment. It was like walking through a maelstrom of razors.

  *

  She listened at the other side of the door, but of course the
y knew that she would be doing this and so they kept their voices low. She could sense the urgency with which they were conversing but not gauge the direction in which the conversation was moving.

  The door to the room she shared with Roger was still closed. She heard him snoring gently within and feared his reaction when he woke to the sound of a mad woman smashing in antique furniture with an axe. If that wasn't grounds for divorce, she didn't know what would be.

  "You shouldn't have said all that," Isla said on the stairs.

  "I meant every word," Lara replied.

  "No, you didn't," Isla said. "But now you have to run away or go through with destroying them. You can't stay here any longer unless you get a grip on them."

  "I know," Lara snapped. "I'm not scared of them."

  "I don't lie to you," Isla said, "so please don't lie to me."

  "Okay," Lara said, shoulders sagging.

  For a moment, she thought that there might be another way, that perhaps the two of them could take off with Roger and leave the sisters to rot in the house by themselves, but it didn't take much to imagine what it would be like living half way around the world and thinking of them in that room, twisting in on each other like in-growing toe-nails, remembering her with malice and spite, wishing that she were dead in their every waking moment and ultimately, perhaps, conspiring to make it so.

  "I have to go out to the shed now," Lara said. "Then I'm going upstairs to finish what I started."

  "Don't do it," Isla said.

  "I have to," Lara whispered.

  "It's a trap," Isla warned her.

  "I'm already trapped," Lara said. "I always have been. All of us have. Unless I end it now, I'll never be free."

  No further words of restraint or encouragement were forthcoming and so Lara continued down the stairs. She set down her stool in the kitchen and climbed onto it to retrieve a large, silver key from on top of the fridge. It had a fob with a smiling, yellow cartoon character attached to the ring. She wondered which of her sisters had attached this fob to the key, like an attempt at levity in the face of what waited on the other side of the locked door.

  She turned on the outside light, hung a flashlight around her neck and drifted out into the chill of the garden.

  *

  Although dark, the garden was alive, with wind rushing through the trees and bushes, making everything tremble and hiss with an air of warning.

  Beyond the glassy eye of the pond and the routinely aborted attempt at a Japanese garden - it was impossible to cultivate a garden without the right schedule of interested sisters to maintain it - was the shed: a ramshackle, wooden structure, in keeping with the house because of its age, if not its appearance.

  She didn't look directly at it right then, otherwise she might not have made it down the path. Instead, she forced herself to approach the general area of the dreaded structure, spurring herself on by thinking of the others laughing at her and plotting how best to stop her plan to destroy them.

  As the wind brought gooseflesh to her arms, she was tempted to go back for her coat, but she knew that momentary hesitation would destroy her resolve. If something had arrived to impede her journey, that would have been just fine. She would have been able to forgive herself for to following through with her threat if, for example, the wind froze her body to the spot. Nothing but an external intervention would do and she wished for it, hard, with every step.

  She thought beyond Isla and away from the other sisters to Roger, asleep in their bed. The memory of his touch warmed her.

  At least, she thought, once her mission was complete, she wouldn't have to worry about having deceived him anymore. She had eleven sisters and, unknown to him, he had married them all having only been introduced to one. This would right all that.

  She raised her head, careful to look only at the space to the right of the shed where tools that were in relatively regular use were kept. They were stored under an extended section of roof, which passably sheltered them from the elements, a necessary addition to the structure, because nobody wanted to go into the shed anymore.

  On the neatly-arranged shelves attached to the shed were various boxes, all labelled and tagged. Below the shelves, were rows of iron hooks and nails, from which hung various garden implements. Petra had drawn around them with marker pen so they could always be returned to the correct position. Of course, the others had mocked her, but it was a great aid now, because Lara saw clearly the black marker outline of a missing axe.

  It was neither among the crates nor the trays in the weeds.

  Of course it was missing.

  Imelda had put it inside. The shed was the place you put things you didn't want to see again.

  She removed the flashlight cord from her neck and shined the beam on the shed door.

  It was a simple shed door, wooden with a small, square glass window set in the top. Through it she saw the outline of objects stacked vertically and diagonally in the darkness, but mostly the light was reflected by the glass.

  Tentatively, she lifted the large padlock that hung from the latch. It began to rain and she allowed herself to get soaked, shuddering, with the padlock in one hand and the key in the other.

  She allowed Imelda's taunting words to come back to her and she stood with them awhile, willing to use any memory that might motivate her to push the key into the lock and turn it.

  "My marble top is not going to cleave itself, is it?" Imelda had scoffed.

  Even though she'd shocked them by marrying Roger and even though she'd invited him into the house, they weren't willing to believe that she was really capable of anything, including their destruction. Nothing she'd done so far had convinced them that they didn't really know her as well as they thought. Nothing she'd done had been enough for them.

  The key went in easily and turned just as well. The padlock snapped open.

  It was frighteningly easy.

  'Stupid little girl' Jocanta had called her.

  She yanked the padlock from the latch and pushed it into her pocket.

  The door swung open all by itself, which caused her to jump back and shine her torch inside from a relatively safe distance.

  Her blueish light immediately picked out the side of a dusty wooden object, about four feet tall and two or three feet wide. It was just as she had expected to find it, which terrified her, because now she had to wonder which other of her fears might be realised if she continued.

  Transfixed by the sight of the chest, she no longer noticed the rain dripping from her nose. It had been two years since she had seen the chest. It wasn't just dusty, she realised, but covered in perhaps greenish-white mould, sickly under the light from the torch. It appeared to have crept over her like a skin disease.

  There was no sign of sentience within, but this was Matilda's chest, which meant that Matilda was in here and Lara would be the first person to go anywhere near her in months, if not years.

  She considered announcing her presence, but dismissed that as unwise. The trick was to get in, find the axe and get out, out, out, shoving the door shut and slamming the padlock back into the latch and clicking it shut and backing away, away, away, back toward the house and her stool and her righteous anger, and Roger, sweet Roger, who need never know anything of what was out here, but would soon wake to the sound of her dismembering her 'mother's' furniture with an axe.

  She stood for many minutes, wishing that all she had imagined were true, that she were back inside having already made her daring dash into the shed and survived, mind and body intact.

  Eventually, she made herself creep toward the threshold, where she suffered an inevitable and interminable period of hesitation before she found herself walking in, legs trembling, inching towards the chest so that she could slide past it and search for the axe.

  She was terrified by the prospect of witnessing the deterioration of Matilda's state of mind. She didn't remember Matilda ever having been particularly friendly or kind, but she'd at least been sane. Now she wasn't so sure
. She'd not heard a word from Matilda since she'd entered this room years ago and there was no good reason to think that she wasn't completely crazy. There was no telling what she would do, if she were even present within the chest.

  With tears of terror hovering in the corners of her eyes, Lara squeezed past the chest, afraid that it would close the gap between them - it was only an inch - and touch her.

  It did not.

  Instead, Lara was assailed by the feel of cobwebs snagging in her hair, then collapsing against her brow and cheek. Her clawing and swatting resulted in the light spinning around the room, the effect of which disorientation was to make her feel more afraid than ever.

  The chest was also marred by cobwebs she saw, holding some of the peeling varnish in place. Webs covered its three sizable drawers, which were about four or five feet wide, and each with two sets of brass handles, dull like the buttons of a discarded uniform.

  Someone, probably Imelda, had set a leaning tower of cracked plant pots on top of it. Minor DIY tools - things for screwing and filing and minor sawing, but not the axe - lay abandoned on top of the surface that was so thick with dust it looked as though it had been carpeted. Underneath the chest, shadows bowed.

  Of the three massive drawers, not one of them was open, not even a crack, like lips squeezed shut to guard a secret. The keyholes were keyless. Knowing Imelda, she'd probably locked the drawers and thrown the keys away.

  Lara used to think of herself as the twelfth sister, the one that didn't fit, but that position really belonged to Matilda. There was no place for her in their family after what she had done.

  And now here was Lara, doing the same thing, taking the body for herself, only being far less subtle about it, which she thought would be the key to her success. She wasn't trying to outsmart Imelda or reason with the others. She was going to take action.