B L A I R E
•
Once my coffee's half drunk and I can't bear to sit here any longer, I'm out of the door, throwing back some vague apology, whatever collection of words I can bring to mind. Not much, considering how overflowing my mind is right now. Yet another aunt I never knew about; yet more family I never got to meet. And my name in a book.
Elizabeth wrote my name. Hers too, and Mum's. But she wrote mine in anger. Each letter seemed scratched into the page, almost tearing through the paper, the red ink as bold as a streak of fresh blood staining that final page.
Once I've decided to leave, I'm out of there like a shot, and I'm a quarter of the way to Anchor Lake when I realise that I'm cycling blind – it's getting dark, a hazy twilight hanging amidst the trees, and I have no light, no fluorescence. I slow my pedalling. This isn't safe. Anyone could come careening around the corner and knock me off my bike. I try to calm my breaths, quiet the screaming pulse pounding at my eardrums; I need to be able to hear. And think. But all I can think is what the fuck?
Why? Why?
Why why why why why why why?
I don't want a repeat of the last time I got on my bike on the cusp of a panic attack. The last person I want to collect me off the roadside is Jacob's mum, mostly because I can't bear for him to know anything about me, especially not the fragility of my mind. So I take it easy, and I make it to Sukie's house in one piece.
I don't know how I got here. I know I cycled, but I can't remember the route, can't remember the turns I made to get here, no idea which roads have carried me to her front door. All I know is that I'm panting on her doorstep, ten minutes after I fled a bemused Elizabeth, with a head full of questions and a phone full of blurry photos.
It's Sara who opens the door, wrapping a cardigan around herself as she ushers me into the house, her forehead creased in a concerned frown.
"Blaire? Are you okay, hun? You were knocking like a madwoman, I thought something terrible had happened."
"I ... sorry, I didn't mean to," I say. "Is Sukie here?"
"She's in the bathroom. She told me I had to answer the door because you were coming over. What's wrong?"
"Nothing, nothing," I say with a huff, trying to get my breath back. "I cycled too hard. And we're watching a scary film tonight. The ride freaked me out."
I don't like to lie to Sara, but I don't want to blurt out everything that has happened in the past thirty minutes. Not before I've told Sukie, anyway.
"Come in, sweetie, come in." Sara shuts the door behind me and I slip off my shoes in the front porch, following her through to the kitchen. "Want a drink? I just boiled the kettle."
"No, thanks. I'm all right." My stomach's sloshing after moving too much and too fast after downing the coffee Elizabeth made me. I'm a bit queasy, actually. I need to lie down, but I also need to keep moving. I can't rest.
A door clicks upstairs; feet pad on the steps; Sukie emerges with damp hair twisted into a knot, her face bare and beautiful. "Hey! I thought that must be you. Ready to get scared?"
I'm already scared.
Sara tuts. "I don't want you crawling into my bed at two o'clock in the morning because you're too scared to sleep."
"Mum." Sukie rolls her eyes. "I haven't crawled into your bed since I was, like, nine."
Sara coughs dramatically. "Thirteen."
"Eleven at the latest. And please stop making me sound like a loser in front of Blaire!" She takes my elbow and leads me towards the basement, the kind of den every kid wants – the walls are lined with bookshelves, and there's all manner of comfortable seats, from a deep, cushy sofa to a couple of limp beanbags.
I drop into the sofa. Sukie doesn't. She stands over me.
"Okay, so, are we gonna talk about why you look like you just saw a ghost?"
"I think my aunt is going to kill me."
Her sudden laugh is like a burst of gunfire, and when I don't join in, she turns serious. "Wait, what? You think Elizabeth is going to kill you?" She drops down next to me and takes me hands. "Blaire, what's going on? Did something happen?"
"I found the book. Her copy of The Key to Anchor Lake." My muscles are trembling; I'm bone-tired.
Sukie leans closer, her grip on my hands tightening. "Did you see what she wrote?"
I nod and shake my head. "There was a lot. It was full of her ... notes, I guess?"
"What makes you think she's going to kill you?
"You know the end of the book?" I spy the library's copy on the side table and grab it, flipping to the back like a woman possessed. "Here, where it says Who next? – in Elizabeth's copy, she wrote Mum's name, and crossed it out. And she wrote my name too."
"What the hell? Why?"
"I don't know. I didn't ask. I freaked out." When I go cold, I pull a thick blanket around my shoulders, nestling into the comforting material. "I told her that I figured out Mary and Betsy are the same person, and she said I need professional help."
Sukie scowls, though anger doesn't suit her. She looks like a frustrated chipmunk. "That's a bit much."
"I mean, it wasn't exactly like that," I mutter, "but basically, she said I need to talk to someone who can help me process everything. Never mind that she could be that person."
"I could," Sukie says. "Not quite a registered therapist or anything, but these ears are always open. Be honest, Blaire – do you really think your aunt wants you dead?"
My shoulders sink. I roll into my side, burrowing under the blanket. "No."
"Did you see what else she wrote?"
"I took pictures. But I was in a rush." I dig out the photos and scroll through them, but it's slideshow of blur. Hardly a word can be made out. "She doesn't know I found it so it might still be there when I go home."
Sukie peers at the photos and lets out a hum of agreement. "I think your aunt clearly knows something we don't."
"That goes without saying." I snort and sit up, still tangled in the blanket. "It's taken me five fucking weeks to find out she had another sister."
"You have another aunt? Who? What's her name?"
"Lissa," I say, "and she's dead. Why does everyone in my family die? What's wrong with us?"
I don't want to cry but my eyes have another idea, tears leaking down my cheeks with an ugly hiccup of a sob.
"Hey, hey, that's not true. You're here. Elizabeth is here. And family isn't limited to the people who share your blood – sometimes family is the people you find along the way." She cups my wet cheeks, her thumbs brushing away two damp trails, and pulls me in for a hug.
She smells like soap and fresh laundry and it's almost as good as her usual smell, just as comforting. I want to wrap myself up in this aroma and let it rock me to sleep and soothe my tears.
"Do you want to talk? Or do you want to watch the film? Or we can just go to bed."
"Let's watch the film," I say. "I mean, there's only so long a girl called Blaire can avoid watching The Blair Witch Project."
"That's the attitude." She digs out a remote control and a television I didn't even notice flickers to life, and she navigates her way to Prime Video and the film's homepage in under a minute. "Sure about this? Once I rent it, there's no going back."
"Do it."
She hits play and steals half of the blanket, tucking up under it and leaning against me, and I already know that the film will be a blur the moment it's over. All I can think about is the heat of her body against mine. All I can hear the steady sound of her quiet breaths. My heart beats Su-kie, Su-kie, Su-kie.
*
We wake up late the next morning. There's hardly any morning left when we stir, several hours after we fell asleep on the sofa under the same blanket. I don't remember how we ended up in this position, how late we stayed up after watching The Blair Witch Project, followed by About Time to keep the nightmares at bay. A poor choice, considering how much that film makes me cry.
It must've been at least three in the morning before we eventually slipped into unconsciousness, drifting off to episodes of Friends until Netflix asked us if we wanted to continue, by which point we were already asleep.
"What time is it?" asks a groggy Sukie, rubbing sleep out of her eyes as she untangles herself from the blanket, pushing messy hair off her face.
My hand falls on my phone. I turn it over. "Eleven forty."
"Shit. Shit shit shit!" She stumbles from the sofa, taming her hair into a bun that she twists tight enough to hide the fact that it's unbrushed. "I need to be at work in twenty minutes."
"Oh, shit. Sorry, Sukie."
"Not your fault. I forgot to set an alarm. I need to get ready."
She races upstairs. I follow at my own pace, surprisingly rested despite a night on a sofa. A night on a sofa with Sukie, I think. That probably explains why I feel good. Well, maybe not good, but less bad than before.
By the time I pull on last night's discarded hoodie and make it to the kitchen for a glass of water, Sukie's thudding down from her bedroom in a jumper and leggings, hopping as she tries to pull on a pair of socks on the move. She swipes a banana from the fruit bowl, wedging it between her thighs to open it with one hand as she pulls on her shoes with the other.
"You don't need to rush," she says to me. "Stay as long as you want, but I gotta go."
"I'll come." I wave The Key to Anchor Lake at her. "If I'm going to dig, might as well be in the vicinity of Anchor Lake's resident archaeologist."
That makes her laugh. "Okay, in which case, you've gotta get your arse in gear because I'm gonna be late if I don't leave in precisely thirty-two seconds."
I stuff my feet into my trainers, old and worn and weak from overuse, and check that I've got my phone and my book. "I'm ready."
Sukie spritzes herself with perfume and rubs it into her wrists, her neck, behind her ears. "Me too."
*
We make it to the café at eleven fifty-nine. By twelve, she's behind the counter, tying the strings of her apron, and within two minutes, I'm the first customer she's served.
I settle into my favourite seat, the one that isn't very comfortable but it's the closest to Sukie, and I open the book. On the back of my receipt, I note down every name that Betsy mentions throughout the pages, my writing getting tinier and tinier as I try to squash everything in. In the later pages, after the long chapter early on where she outlines the events, she mentions more. Some are full names – all of the Martins, of course, Edward and Eleanor and Josephine and Alison – and some are only the first.
By the end, across sixteen tragedies – seventeen if I include the 1971 bus crash, which I don't, as the only name Betsy mentions is her own – I have a list that fills the back of another three receipts.
From 1619, the seventeen witches: Temperance Key. Clemence Lovell. Fortune Fitton. Barbara Sedlow. Frideswide Makepiece. Mildred Shylton. Mabel Ginter. Sarah Chase. Joyce Alard. Blanche Chaundelor. Winifred Asplyn. Gillian Lond. Maud Scarclyf. Avis Metcalf. Helen Groston. Sybil Myddilton. Rose Culpepper.
And then Henry, 1644. Norma, 1669. Michael, 1669. Nicholas, 1694. Isabel, 1694. Alice White, 1719. Henrietta White, 1719. Savannah White, 1719. Francis White, 1719. George, 1744. Rachel, 1744. Rebecca Smith, 1769. Oscar Garbett, 1794. Franny, 1794. Janice, 1794. Cecily, 1794. Isaac, 1794. Gregory, 1794. Emily Garbett, 1819. Simon, 1819. Ronald Jackson, 1844. Robert, 1869. Duncan, 1894. Amelia Bell, 1919. Ruth Bell, 1919. Clarence Bell, 1919. Ethel Bell, 1919. Edwin Bell, 1919. Louise Wright, 1944. Margaret Bell, 1944. Eleanor Martins, 1969. Edward Martins, 1969. Keith Hanlon, 1969. Josephine Martins, 1994. Alison Martins, 1994. Kieran Jennings, 1994. Robert Ludlow, 1994.
Fifty-two names, over the course of three hundred and seventy-five years. Throughout the book, Betsy mentions over five hundred deaths, not including the uncountable masses, possibly thousands, who lost their lives to smallpox in 1719 and Spanish flu in 1919, but she plucks out a mere fifty-two to mention.
Some, I can discount, like Kieran Jennings, and the four children of Amelia Bell who died with her in 1919, and Alice's three children who perished alongside her in 1719. Probably, I imagine, the sixteen witches who were executed as well as Temperance Key, and the two murderers who died in prison. That still leaves only twenty-six names. Twenty-six people, including Betsy's mother, her father, her sister, her child. Who are the other twenty-six? Why did she deem them worthy?
Sukie breaks me out of my concentration when she bounces over with a freshly toasted sandwich and pulls up a chair. "I had a revelation."
"You did?"
"Yes. I can't stop thinking about what you said, about how it's about the people and not the years." She takes a huge bite of her toastie. "I don't think it's quite right."
I listen, intrigued.
"You figured that based on 1971, right?" she asks. "It doesn't fit the whole twenty-five year pattern, so the pattern can't be about that?"
"Right."
"But that's not the only reason it doesn't fit."
"What d'you mean?"
"I was reading the book last night, before you came over," she says, brushing crumbs from her apron, "and I realised that all the names she mentions are people who died, right?"
"Right." I show her my receipts. "These are all the names I found."
"And they all died in the tragedy that she writes about."
"Yeah."
"Except in 1971." Her cheeks are going pink, her eyes are brightening. "In 1971, the only name she mentions is her own, and she's the only one to survive."
Oh my god. She's right. My mouth gapes. "I didn't even notice."
She's beaming, almost jigging in her seat she's so excited. "I think the years do matter. I really do, Blaire. And I also think you're right – the people matter, too. It's about both."
"It's about both," I murmur.
"It's not just about bad things happening every twenty-five years, and it's not just about certain people dying in tragedies. It's about tragedies happening every twenty-five years, which kill the specific people she mentions."
I scan the list in front of me, and I think so hard that I can feel my brain wheezing, on the edge of a breakdown. "You're right."
"I am?"
"I think so. That ... oh my god, Sukie. You're right. She only mentions 1971 because it's her tragedy. It is an anomaly, but it isn't random."
"Exactly! It doesn't fit, and it's not supposed to. Like, she dedicates a wholechapter to it, but she barely mentions it in her round up of the 20thcentury disasters. She's using it as, I don't know, some kind of therapy, to write about it. That's Betsy slipping through in the writing. The rest, that's the pattern."
Holy shit. "Holy shit."
"So, the bad news," she says, covering her mouth as she chews. "I guess that means the whole 2019 is doomed theory has some weight."
"Fuck."
Something's going to happen. I don't know what and I don't know when, but I can feel it in the air. The metallic tang of disaster, a fireball brewing. Something dark and heavy staining the atmosphere, hurtling towards us.
*