Ta Voix

Lily Carter’s bedroom glowed pale and luminous, the TV fizzed with white noise. Milly stared up at the popcorn ceiling unblinking, sweating from the nightmare that had woken her. The night’s orchestra consisted of gentle breaths and the shift of soft limbs fidgeting in the syrupy heat of the room. Milly was smothered beneath the sweet, cloying scent of girl bodies; baby powder, sugar and their mother’s perfume. She breathed through her mouth.

Milly sat up, shushing the rustle of her sleeping bag. She clung to the edge of the room, closest to the door. Surveying the tangled limbs of the seven other girls in the room, Milly wondered how she’d ended up here, at Lily Carter’s sixteenth birthday sleepover. She’d spent hours in a crowded bedroom, spoken when spoken to, laughing on cue and smiling for the flash of a Polaroid camera. Lily had been kind to invite her, she supposed, but the invitation had still been addressed to her and Abby. Written before, sent after.

She slipped out of her sleeping bag and into the abrupt cool of the hallway. Bathed in sudden darkness, Milly ran her hands over the unfamiliar walls, bumping her fingers against family photographs and framed certificates as she fumbled for the bannister. She took careful steps down the stairs, grateful for the carpet that cushioned the sound of her feet.

A deeper blackness greeted her at the foot of the stairs, swaddled her like a shroud. Milly shivered, sweat cooling against her clammy skin. Her eyes adjusted slowly as she found the living room, banging her shins on the low coffee table as she reached for the curtains. The fat milk spill of the moon flooded the room and chased away the dark.

Maybe she’d been foolish to think that this wouldn’t happen ­— that the nightmares wouldn’t come. She’d thought the armour of the other girls would protect her, but as she sank into an overstuffed armchair and stared into the shadowy reflection of the TV screen, Milly’s eyes blinked slowly, heavy with sleep. She clapped her palms across her eyes and squeezed them shut, dug her fingers into the delicate purpled skin of her eyelids and watched the colours smear and muddy.

Milly held her breath, neck prickling. The silence hung like a guillotine. What was the point in fighting it? She was coming, whether she liked it or not.

Milly tilted her head back and let her eyes sink into the in-between.

She thought of Abby. Fire-flame hair tangled and curled, honey-hazel eyes that lit up with a joke or a scheme. The wide stretch of her chapped lips over crooked teeth and the drizzle of freckles over her nose that Milly had counted one night when they had lain side by side in the grass. When she thought of Abby she could still feel her. Long strong limbs that wrapped around her, pinkies entwined with promises they made in the dark. Mouths pressed to cheeks, pressed to shoulders, pressed close but not close enough. Their bodies curled like commas in Milly’s narrow bed. The smell of Abby in her nose; fresh cut grass and clean cotton. Her knees would be bruised, white ankle socks dirty from running around without shoes.

Milly opened her eyes.

A spectre of red hair and the white dress Mrs Hansen had buried her daughter in. Corpse-like even in Milly’s memory. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t quite erase the bruises beneath Abby’s eyes, the ugly hollow of her cheeks, or the greasy pallor of her skin. She was Abby, but not her Abby. A phantom dead thing wearing a poorly-made Abby mask. Oh, how she hated it. Hated it and loved it and could barely stand to look at it, this Abby ghost who haunted her; who demanded to be conjured in the dark places between the night and day. She was nothing like the memory of her. She was everything like the memory of her.

The TV flickered on, the now familiar buzz of white noise blurring behind Milly’s eyes, burrowing into her flesh like a wasp sting. She wanted to keep her eyes closed, to ignore this haunting and lay her body and Abby’s to rest. They could spend hours like this, looking at each other, not looking at each other. Milly desperately wishing Dead Abby was Real Abby; Dead Abby wishing Milly would just do something.

Sometimes when Milly conjured her when she did not want to be disturbed, Dead Abby would scare her. She’d open her mouth and let black slick roll over her chin, down her throat. Maggots that squirmed, blood that poured. A scream that rang and rattled around the room, loud only to Milly’s ears. Dead Abby would roll her eyes back until only the whites showed, and she’d shiver and shake, head banging bloody against the floor, nails broken as they grappled for purchase. A twisted performance of how Real Abby had really died, while Milly watched and writhed and screamed for it to stop.

Other times Milly would rage, her throat raw and hot with fury at the injustice. She would demand answers, offer every ounce of magic in her body up to the dead thing that wore her best friend’s face but nothing, nothing ever worked. Dead Abby would sip at the magic pooled in her palms and thirst for more, but there was only so much Milly could give without giving her everything.

Tonight wasn’t like those nights, tonight Dead Abby sat on the arm of the overstuffed chair and let Milly rest her head on her cold thigh. Dead Abby ran her hand through Milly’s hair while she cried. She thought this was both better and worse, to be so close and yet to know it was a lie felt like a different sort of agony; one she wasn’t sure she could recover from. If she could just pretend that the stench of rot in her nose was her imagination, that the hard marble cradle of Abby’s lap was soft and warm like it should be, that the hand in her hair didn’t feel stiff and awkward and nothing like Real Abby at all.

Time withered away in the dark. She dreamt, or at least something like dreaming, of her and Abby, together again. Abby’s dress was red, her mouth was red, her eyes were red – her hair, her hair was red too. That was right, wasn’t it? Red hair. Red everything. Milly’s hands were red in the dream. Wet and sticky, the kind of red that doesn’t wash out.

This is what happened when she let Dead Abby crawl inside her head, when she let herself play these games of pretend. Worse still, it was only when she was held like this that she ever really slept.

So Milly slept there until the sky spilt blood. Dead Abby stiff as a corpse beneath her, but still there, still hers. Milly stood from the cradle of her arms, and closed the curtains against the weak sunlight beginning to filter through the clouds.

“You know what to do,” Dead Abby said in a voice that almost sounded like Real Abby. Milly’s throat tightened and her heart began to rabbit in her chest.

“You know what to do if you want me back.”

Her eyes burned.

This waxwork of her friend that she could make real again, if she wanted to. She couldn’t hold on forever, not to Abby, not to anything. The sun would bleach it all away and Milly would have to wait for another night to bring her back again. She didn’t belong in the sunlight anymore, not even Milly could tether her to the earth; when the sun bathed everything in light, it burned all away. Milly would sleep with the heat of it on her eyelids and dream of Abby, dream of a winter where the sun would never be bright enough to keep her away.

“You know what to do.”

Abby said it every time Milly conjured her, and Milly did know what to do. She considered the girls upstairs, she thought about a knife and how easy it might be to press the sharp tip of one into their soft bodies. Their flesh would split and ooze like the skin of a rotten peach. The pulp would slip through Milly’s fingers like meat. Their bodies would cool and grow stiff, lose the loose limbed life of their girlhood. It would take more than one girl; Abby was so big, so full of life, one girl wouldn’t do it. She’d have to repaint Lily Carter’s pastel pink bedroom red to bring her Abby back.

She wondered if she could do it; really do it. She already hurt so much, so what was a little more pain? Hurting someone else might even feel good. Wasn’t it worth it? To have her back? Milly let the possibility of it unspool in her mind, pulling at the thread to test its strength.

Milly stared down at her warped reflection in the mirror of the knife she held in a white knuckle grip, the fizz of white noise thundering in her head. When had she found her way to the kitchen? More light burned through the curtains but the kitchen was cool and dark. They would be waking up soon.

Dead Abby said nothing, just watched her. Like she knew that if she were to speak it would shatter whatever fragile control she had over her, that her grip was already slipping as the sun blared brighter. But she couldn’t hide it. Dead Abby’s eyes grew hungry and desperate as the light crept across the tiled floor.

Her mouth yawned and needle pointed teeth formed a black maw ready to swallow her whole. Milly stared and stared and stared, and with a trembling hand slid the knife back into the block. The metal sang as it slipped into the wood, the sound sharp like a slash; Abby flinched, mouth snapping shut.

She knows that when she turns back, Abby, Real and Dead, will be gone again, and she will be alone. She knows that Dead Abby will be harder to find next time, and will frighten her because she has refused, again, to do what needs to be done to have her whole, within reach of Milly’s arms. Lily’s sleepover had presented an opportunity she might not get again and Milly had given it up.

She opened her fist, her fingers ached with holding their curled position for all these long hours, bones creaking as they straightened.
They trembled, they’ll hurt for hours more but Milly will stop feeling it soon, when the pain in her heart gets worse. When she starts to forget the feel of Abby near, the cramp in her fingers will be welcome only because it means that it had been real, if only for a few hours a night.

Hands open and loose at her sides, four crescent moons pressed deep and bloody in the palm of each hand. Blood dripped onto the soft white carpet like bread crumbs. She’ll clean the wounds and dress them later, for now the sight of the blood helps ground her in this world instead of the one in the in-between that she shares with Abby.

Upstairs, Milly slipped back into her sleeping bag, the girls still asleep around her. She knows that Abby, too, is quiet again in her coffin miles from the Carter house. A little farther from Milly’s grip now, the red thread fragile and fraying between them. She will have to make a choice much sooner than she’d like.

With a sigh, Milly shut her eyes and the white noise of the downstairs TV blinked out.