Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

As it turned out, she had-for all the good it would do.

“C’mon, Lilith, we have to find that money and get out of here.”

Although she seemed to be unharmed physically, the girl’s repetitive, almost robotic preoccupation with the workings of the toilet had continued while Lyssy cuffed Pender to the brass rail of the headboard (“Is that too tight? Let me know if it’s too tight.”), gagged him with torn strips of sheeting (“I know it’s uncomfortable-there, is that better?”), then wrapped him with winding sheets (“Here we go round the mulberry bush.”) and left him lying there next to Mama Rose, similarly gagged, cuffed, and bound; they looked like two mummies lying with their hands raised in surrender.

“C’mon, please?” There was no indication that Lilith recognized Lyssy. She seemed scarcely aware of his existence, or rather, of his existence as a fellow sentient being-for all the notice she took of him as he tugged her out of the bathroom, he might have been a mechanical device to which she was attached, a winch or a block and tackle.

He closed the bathroom door, led her into the middle of the bedroom, and let go of her, just to see what she’d do. With the door closed, she appeared to have forgotten about her beloved toilet-out of sight, out of mind. Instead she glanced around the bedroom, where half a dozen candles now flickered and glowed, then made straight for the antique brass apothecary scale on the dresser, stepping over the denim-clad, ponytailed body of the dead interloper as if it were a log.

Soon she was engrossed in balancing the counterpoised trays with the tiny brass milk-bottle-shaped weights; everything else, including Lyssy, had apparently ceased to exist for her.

“Lilith, we have to go,” he said again, dumping the scale and weights into the pillowcase, along with Carson’s revolver, which he’d reloaded from a box of shells he’d found in the drawer of the bedside table. There was another pistol with a wooden handle in the other bedside table, but Lyssy decided to take the dead man’s gun instead. It was lying where it had fallen, inches from the outstretched hand of the now-faceless corpse. He picked it up and popped the clip to see how many rounds were left. There were fourteen, with another round in the chamber: Mick hadn’t fired a single shot.

The girl watched from the bedroom doorway, fascinated, as Lyssy worked the pistol’s mechanism; now she held out her hand, making that mewing noise again, and stamping her bare foot on the doorstep.

“Sorry, Charlie,” he told her-one of Dr. Al’s corny sayings. “These things are dangerous if you don’t know how to…holy cow.” He looked down at the gun in his hand-it had finally dawned on him that for all his demonstrated expertise, before this evening he himself had never fired a gun, never even held a pistol. And yet handling one seemed to be second nature to him. Which meant…what?

His mind working at warp speed, he came up with three possibilities. The first was that he’d picked up his knowledge of firearms unconsciously, maybe from all the videos and TV shows he’d watched, and had proved to be a natural.

Another possibility was that since he and his alters shared one brain, perhaps as the original personality he was able to draw upon the knowledge and experience of the alters without even being aware of it-which was a little scary.

But there was a third possibility, even more frightening: that he was the one being used. By Max. Or guided, or controlled, or whatever you wanted to call it. A jolt of terror coursed through him at the thought. It was like that bad dream he used to have when he first came to the Institute, a nightmare where he’s running from a monster, and finally reaches a safe place. Only there’s a mirror there, and when he looks into it, he sees the monster’s face looking back at him and realizes he hasn’t escaped at all. And never would, because he was the monster and the monster was him.

Then he heard that faint mewing sound again. He looked up, saw Lilith standing in the doorway wearing that ridiculous orange muumuu, looking for all the world like a little girl playing dress-up in Mommy’s clothes, and suddenly all that mattered to him was taking care of her.

Earlier that evening, he’d found himself unable to carry through on his threat to torture Mama Rose until she told him where the money was. After running out of verbal threats, he’d settled for tying her up, covering the still-naked Lilith with a muumuu from the closet, and leaving the girl to entertain herself with the endlessly fascinating toilet while he disposed of the troll’s body, dumping it into the hot tub and dragging the plywood cover over the tub. Then he began his search of the house and grounds.

He’d been going through the living room for the second time when he heard the two men out on the patio. He’d ducked behind the sofa, followed them into the bedroom, caught them by surprise.

And now it was time to try playing the Spanish Inquisition game again. It occurred to Lyssy that he might be less inhibited if Lilith weren’t within earshot.

“C’mon, let’s go find your own clothes,” he told her, dropping the second gun into the pillowcase sack, then holding it over his head and shaking it alluringly as he brushed by her on his way out of the room. Zombie-like, she turned and followed him down the short hallway, through the living room, and out onto the patio.

The moon had risen since he’d last been out here, illuminating the overturned table, the scattered furniture, and the dark pool of blood. He righted the table, then dumped the scale and weights out for Lilith to play with while he snatched her sweater and jeans off the trellis where she’d draped them earlier.

She neither resisted nor assisted him as he took off the muumuu. His breath caught in his throat to see her naked in the moonlight. He wrestled the sweater over her head, somehow pulled her arms through the sleeves, then knelt at her feet and lifted her legs one at a time, as if he were shoeing a horse, to get her jeans on. As he tugged them up past her knees, the back pocket turned inside out and a small white card fluttered to the ground.

Lyssy picked it up, turned it over, shined his flashlight on it, and whistled under his breath. There, spelled out for his convenience, were the name, address, and phone numbers of Lily’s original psychiatrist, Dr. Irene Cogan, the woman he remembered from their stroll through the arboretum Monday afternoon.

“You know what, I’m starting to think things might be turning our way,” he told Lilith, slipping the card into his own pocket. “You stay here, have fun with your new toys. I have to go talk to Mama Rose-I’ll be back soon.”

Lyssy limped back inside to the bedroom where Pender and Mama Rose were tied up, pulled a chair over to Mama Rose’s side of the bed, leaned over, and tugged the gag from her mouth. Her face and hair were still spattered with gobbets of blood and brain matter, none of it her own. “I’m trying to be polite about this, ma’am. Dr. Al always said you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And I’m sorry about what happened to your husband. I wish I could bring him back, I really do. But I have responsibilities now. I have Lilith to think of. And we’re going to need that money to have even a chance of surviving out there. So either you tell me where it is, or I have to…to…”

His glance had fallen upon the mother-of-pearl-handled jackknife lying open on the bed.

Sudden flash: a knife in a hand scarred and crippled like his own hand rises and falls, rises and falls against a backdrop of bright bunting and bobbing birthday balloons. Confusion-he is neither here nor there, neither himself nor someone else. The bed is an island, floating in a sea of darkness. There is only the knife in his hand and the redhead laid out before him, mummified like some kind of ritual sacrifice.