Authors: V.C. Andrews
She held up our twins by their long golden hair. They were about to be thrust into her hot oven! Already they were frosted pink and blue, and their flesh, without cooking, was beginning to turn into gingerbread, and their blue eyes into black raisins!
I screamed! Over and over again I screamed!
The witch whirled to glare at me with her gray flintstone eyes, and her sunken mouth, thin as a red knife slash, opened wide to laugh! Hysterically, she laughed on and on as Chris and I cringed in shock. She threw back her head, her wide open mouth exposing fang-like tonsils—and startlingly, frighteningly, she began to change from the grandmother. From a caterpillar into a butterfly she emerged as we stood frozen, and could only watch . . . and there from the horror came our mother!
Momma! Her blond hair flowed as silken, streaming ribbons, writhing forward on the floor to snare us both like snakes! Slithering coils of her hair twined up and around our legs, to creep nearer our throats . . . trying to strangle us into silence . . . no threat to her inheritance then!
I love you, I love you, I love you, she whispered without words.
I woke up, but Chris slept on and on, just as the twins did.
I grew desperate as sleep wanted to come and take me again. I tried to fight it off, the terrible drowsiness of drowning, drowning, and then again I was sunken deep in dreams, in nightmarish dreams. I ran wild into the dark, and into a pool of blood I fell. Blood sticky as tar, smelling of tar, and diamond-spangled fish with swan heads and red eyes came and nibbled on my arms and legs so they went numb and unfeeling, and the fish with the swan heads laughed, laughed, laughed, glad to see me done in, and made bloody all over. See! See! They shouted in whiny voices that echoed and re-echoed.
You can’t get away!
The morning came pale behind the heavy drawn draperies that shut out the yellow light of hope.
Carrie turned over in her sleep and cuddled up closer to me, “Momma,” she murmured, “I don’t like this house.” Her silky hair on my arm felt like goose-down, as slowly, slowly, feeling began to return to my hands and arms, feet and legs.
I lay still on the bed as Carrie squirmed restlessly, wanting my arms about her, and I felt so drugged I couldn’t move my arms. What was wrong with me? My head so heavy, as if it were stuffed full of rocks so my skull was pressured from the inside and the pain was so great my skull was likely to split wide open! My toes and fingers still tingled. My body was leaden. The walls advanced, then retreated, and nothing had straight vertical lines.
I tried to see my reflection in the shimmering mirror across the way, yet when I tried to turn my swollen head, it refused to budge. And always before I went to sleep, I spread my hair on my pillow so I could turn my head, and nestle my cheek in the sweet-smelling silkiness of very pampered, well-cared-for, healthy, strong hair. It was one of the sensual things I enjoyed, the feel of my hair against my cheek to take me into sweet dreams of love.
And yet, today, there was no hair on my pillow. Where was my hair?
The scissors, they still lay on the dresser top. I could vaguely
see them. Swallowing repeatedly to clear the way, I forced out a small cry, uttering Chris’s name, not Momma’s. I prayed to God to make Him let my brother hear. “Chris,” I finally managed to whisper in the strangest, gritty voice, “something is the matter with me.”
My whispered, weak words roused Chris, though I don’t know how he heard. He sat up and sleepily rubbed his eyes. “What yuh want, Cathy?” he asked.
I mumbled something that took him from his bed, and in his rumpled blue pajamas, his hair a golden mop, he ambled over to my bed. He jerked up short. He drew in his breath and made small gasping sounds of horror and shock.
“Cathy, oh my God!”
His cry sent shivers of fear down my spine.
“Cathy . . . oh, Cathy,” he moaned.
As he stared, and as I wondered what he was seeing that made his eyes bulge, I tried to lift my leaden arms and feel my swollen, heavy head. Somehow I managed to get my hands up there—and that’s when I found a loud voice to scream! Really scream! Over and over again I howled like someone demented until Chris ran to gather me in his arms.
“Stop, please stop,” he sobbed. “ ‘Remember the twins . . . don’t scare them more . . . please don’t scream again, Cathy. They’ve been through so much, and I know you don’t want to scar them permanently, and you will, if you don’t calm down. It’s all right, I’ll get rid of it. I swear on my life, that today, somehow, I’ll get the tar from your hair.”
He found a small red prick on my arm where the grandmother had plunged in a hypodermic needle to keep me asleep with some drug. And while I slept, she had poured hot tar on my hair. She must have gathered it all into a neat bunch before she used the tar, for not a strand was left free of the gook.
Chris tried to keep me from looking into the mirror, but I shoved him away, and had to stare with my mouth agape at the horrible black blob that was my head now. Like a huge wad of
black bubble gum, chewed and left in an unsightly mess, it even ran down my face and streaked my cheeks with black tears!
I looked, and I knew that he’d never get the tar out. Never!
Cory woke up first, ready to run to the windows and draw aside the closed draperies and peek outside to see the sun that kept hiding from him. He was out of bed and ready to dash to the windows when he saw me.
His eyes widened. His lips parted. His small fluttering hands reached upward to rub at his eyes with fists, and then he was staring at me again with so much disbelief. “Cathy,” he managed finally, “is that you?”
“I guess it is.”
“Why is your hair black?”
Before I could reply to that question, Carrie was awake.
“Oooh!”
she howled. “Cathy—your head looks funny!” Big tears came to glisten her eyes and slide down her cheeks. “I don’t like your head now!” she wailed, then began to sob as if the tar were on
her hair.
“Calm down, Carrie,” said Chris, in the most ordinary, everyday tone of voice. “It’s only tar on Cathy’s hair—and when she takes a bath, and shampoos her hair, it will be the same as yesterday. While she does that, I want the two of you to eat the oranges for breakfast, and look at TV. Later on we’ll all eat a real breakfast, when Cathy’s hair is clean.” He didn’t mention our grandmother for fear of instilling in them even more terror of our situation. So they sat on the floor close as bookends, supporting only each other, and peeled and ate orange sections, losing themselves in the sweet nothingness of cartoons and other Saturday morning violence and foolishness.
Chris ordered me into a tub full of hot water. In that almost scalding water I dunked my head over and over again while Chris used shampoo to soften the tar. The tar did soften, but it didn’t come out and leave my hair clean. His fingers moved in a sodden mass of sticky goo. I heard myself making small whimpering sounds. He did try, oh, he did try to take out the tar without taking
out all my hair. And all I could think of was the scissors—the shiny scissors the grandmother had laid on the dresser top.
On his knees by the tub, Chris finally managed to work his fingers through the mass, but when he withdrew them, they were clogged with sticky black hair. “You’ll have to use the scissors!” I cried out, tired of the whole thing after two hours. But no, the scissors were the last resort. He reasoned there must be some chemical solution that would dissolve the tar, without dissolving my hair. He had a very professional chemistry set Momma had given him. On the lid was a stern warning: “This is not a toy. This box contains dangerous chemicals and is for professional use only.”
“Cathy,” he said, sitting back on his bare heels, “I’m going up to the attic schoolroom and mix some compound to take the tar from your hair.” He grinned at me shyly then. The light from the ceiling caught on the soft downy fuzz that covered his upper lip, and I knew he had stronger, darker hair on the lower part of his body, the same as I did. “I’ve got to use the John, Cathy. I’ve never done that in front of you, and I’m kind of embarrassed. You can turn your back, and put your fingers in your ears, and maybe if you go in the water too, the ammonia might unglue your hair.”
I couldn’t help but stare at him in amazement. The day had taken on nightmarish proportions. To sit in boiling water and use it for a toilet and then wash my hair in that? Could it be real that I would do this as Chris streamed urine into the commode behind my back? I said to myself, no, this wasn’t real, just a dream. Carrie and Cory wouldn’t use the bathroom, too, while I was in the tub, dunking my hair in foul water.
It was real enough. Hand in hand, Cory and Carrie came to the tub and stared at me, wanting to know why I was taking so long.
“Cathy, what is that stuff on your head?”
“Tar.”
“Why did you put tar in your hair?”
“I must have done it in my sleep.”
“Where did you find the tar?”
“In the attic.”
“Why did you want to put tar in your hair?”
I hated lying! I wanted to tell her who put the tar in my hair, but I couldn’t let her know. Already she and Cory were scared enough of that old woman. “Go back and look at TV, Carrie,” I ordered, testy and irritable from all the questions she asked, and hating to look at her thin, hollowed-out cheeks, her sunken eyes.
“Cathy, don’t you like me no more?”
“Anymore . . .”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course I like you, Cory. I love you both, but I put the tar on my hair by mistake, and now I’m mad at myself.”
Carrie wandered off to sit once more near Cory. They whispered back and forth in that strange language that only they could understand. Sometimes, I think they were far wiser than Chris and I suspected.
For hours I was in the tub, while Chris concocted a dozen different compounds to test on a bit of my hair. He tried everything, making me change the water often, always making it hotter. I shriveled into a puckered prune as bit by bit he cleared the gooey mess from my hair. The tar came out, eventually, along with a great loss of hair. But I had a lot, and could afford to lose much without making a noticeable difference. And when it was over, the day was gone, and neither Chris nor I had eaten a bite. He had given cheese and crackers to the twins, but he himself hadn’t wasted time to eat. Wrapped in a towel, I sat on the bed and dried my much thinned hair. What was left was fragile. It broke easily, and the color was almost platinum.
“You might as well have saved yourself the effort,” I said to Chris, who was hungrily eating two crackers with cheese. “She hasn’t brought up any food—and she won’t bring any up until you cut it all off.”
He came to me, bearing a plate with cheese and crackers, and
holding a glass of water. “Eat and drink. We will outsmart her. If by tomorrow she doesn’t bring up some food, or if Momma doesn’t show up, I’ll cut off just your front hair, over your forehead. Then you can wrap your head with a scarf, like you’re ashamed to be seen bald-headed, and soon enough that hair will grow back in.”
Sparingly, I ate the cheese and crackers, not answering. I washed down my one meal of the day with water from the bathroom tap. Then Chris brushed that pale, pale weak hair that had endured so much. Peculiar how fate works things out: my hair had never gleamed more, or felt so much like gossamer silk, and I was grateful to have any left at all. I lay back on the bed, worn out, enervated by emotion torn asunder, and watched Chris sitting on the bed just looking at me. When I fell asleep, he was still there, watching me, and in his hand he held a long coil of my spiderweb, silken hair.
That night I fretted in and out of sleep, restless, tormented. I felt helpless, angry, frustrated.
And then I saw Chris.
He was still in the clothes he’d worn all day. He’d moved the heaviest chair in the room so that it was against the door, and in that chair he sat and dozed, while in his hand he held the pair of long and sharp scissors. He had barred the way, so the grandmother couldn’t sneak in again and use the scissors. He was, even in his sleep, guarding me from her.
As I stared over at him, his eyes opened, jolted, as if he hadn’t meant to doze off and leave me unprotected. In the dimness of that locked room, always rosy at night, he caught my gaze, and our eyes locked, and ever so slowly he smiled. “Hi.”
“Chris,” I sobbed, “go to bed. You can’t keep her out forever.”
“I can while you sleep.”
“Then let me be the sentry. We’ll take turns.”
“Who’s the man here, you or me? Besides, I eat more than you do.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“You’re too thin now, and staying awake all night would make you thinner, whereas I can afford to lose weight.”
He was underweight, too. We all were, and his slight weight wouldn’t keep that grandmother out if she really wanted to shove the door open. I got up and went to sit with him in the chair, though he gallantly protested.
“Ssh,” I whispered. “The two of us together can keep her out better, and we can both sleep.” Embraced in each other’s arms, we fell asleep.
And the morning came . . . without the grandmother . . . without food.
* * *
The hungry days passed by endlessly, miserably.
Only too soon the cheese and crackers were gone, though we ate most sparingly of what we had. And that was when we really began to suffer. Chris and I drank only water, and saved what milk there was for the twins.
Chris came to me with the shears in his hand, and reluctantly, with tears, he cut off the front top hair close to my scalp. I wouldn’t look in a mirror when it was done. The long part that was left, I wrapped about my head, and over that I formed a scarf into a turban.
Then came the irony, the bitter irony of the grandmother not coming to check!
She didn’t bring us food, or milk, or clean linens, or towels, or even the soap and toothpaste we had run out of. Not even toilet paper. Now I regretted throwing out all the tissue our expensive clothes came in. There was nothing left to do but tear pages from the oldest books in the attic and use that.
Then the toilet bowl stopped up, and overflowed, and Cory began to scream as filth flooded over and filled the bathroom. We didn’t have a plunger. Frantically, Chris and I wondered what to do. As he ran for a coat hanger made of wire to straighten out and push down whatever clogged the drain, I ran to the attic to fetch old clothes to mop up the flooding mess.
Somehow Chris managed to use the wire coat hanger, and the commode worked normally again. Then, without a word, he got down on his knees beside me, and we both mopped up the floor with the old clothes from the attic trunks.