Page 25 of Tangled at the Root
“Do you remember now?” Rosemary asks urgently.
This time, I hear my grandmother’s words when she responds.
“Yes.” Her voice is a low, inhuman hiss. Her gaze flies back to Rosemary, but her next words come out in static, broken sentences, like a bad connection over the radio. “This house—cleansing—was a—did it—generations—have to—I told her—now we—”
Oh God. Oh no. What is she saying?
I glance at Rosemary. She doesn’t look confused. She doesn’t ask my grandmother to clarify or repeat herself. Her hand is squeezing mine tight. It feels like she’s squeezing my lungs, as well, my chest heaving with rushed, panicked breaths.
My grandmother is becoming hysterical, but Rosemary is still listening intently, not panicking at all.
“—understand?” She snarls the word out. “She—contained—if not—”
The study is growing dark. At first, I think it’s the looming rainfall finally arriving, but when I look up, I can tell the darkness is locked specifically to this room.
“Rosemary,” I whisper, trying to tug my hand out of her grasp. When that doesn’t work, I try to pull us both out of the centre of the candles.
She doesn’t let go, doesn’t budge.
My grandmother is morphing again. Her limbs are cracking and growing, her back arching and extending until she’s towering over us, her eyes entirely black. She’s still talking somehow, spitting words out through a row of sharpened teeth.
“Rosemary!” My supernatural strength has left me; all my attempts to drag her out, away from here—away fromthis, are failing, like she’s somehow sapping all my energy through our connected hands.
My grandmother’s arched back touches the ceiling. She’s hunched over on all fours, her abnormally long, thin arms stretching all the way down to the floor, her claws scraping against it. All the brown has been sucked unceremoniously from her skin, leaving her gaunt and grey.
The silence when she stops talking feels thunderous. Her mouth stretches into a grin that splits half her face. The smell of something old and rotting fills the air.
Rosemary jerks backward, her breath hitching as she finally,finallyseems to realise the danger we’re in.
I turn to say something, once more attempting to drag us both out of the centre of the candles if it means it would break the connection.
My grandmother screams, the sound so loud and horrifying it makes both Rosemary and I cry out and instinctively duck.
The walls of the study contract like a lung on an exhale. The house groans like an animal in pain.
Then Rosemary’s head explodes.
8: ONE MORE SECRET
Idon’t remember the first time I died. I was six years old, according to my mother. We’d gone to the market, she and I, and I’d slipped away from her side for a moment while she’d been haggling over the price of something. I don’t even recall what had been important enough to snag my attention.
One second, my mother had told me, years after. All it had taken was one second.
I don’t remember the car hitting me. I don’t remember flying across the road. What I remember is waking up, disoriented, surrounded by a multitude of strangers staring down at me like I was an alien, and the taste of earth and blood in the back of my throat.
My mother had shoved her way between the bodies until she’d gotten to me, her expression wild with a visceral fear that still makes me break out in goose pimples when I think back.
She’d managed, by some miracle, to get me away from the crowd before all my injuries had finished healing, my broken skin and bones knitting themselves neatly back together under invisible hands.
She’d used her eshé on the witnesses, she’d later told me, forcing them to forget what they’d seen.
As she’d carried me away, I remember asking in a strangely detached voice, “Mummy, am I going to die?” and her answering hysterical laugh.
“No, honey.” I’d wondered why she sounded so sad. “You’re not going to die.”
The moment had passed, insignificant in the eyes of six-year-old me. When all my cuts and bruises disappeared abnormally fast compared to everyone else’s, my mother had smiled brightly—though a little maniacally—and told me my long awaited gift from our ancestors must’ve been healing.
But it seemed she hadn’t been sure. I’d been confused when she’d insisted on bathing me a few weeks later; at that age, she’d started letting me take my bath in privacy and without supervision. I hadn’t thought her request odd—why would I have?—so I hadn’t protested.
