My sister died when I was nine years old. She has no grave, nor is there any official record of what became of her. Like shallow marks in stone she would have worn away, had I not been left behind to remember.
The others that know of her death don’t believe in it, or not as any but they two would understand.
When I was a little girl, my family lived off the grid on a plot of land a short distance from the Australian Outback. We scarcely saw or interacted with strangers, whom my parents, through a shared paranoia, distrusted entirely.
My mother and father followed an outlier religion whose name and practices I recall now only vaguely, having run away from home at just fourteen, a stumbling child. What I do know is that my parents communed with things I couldn’t see in the night, and that sometimes those things spoke back.
Our ancestors had talked with those same spirits in Ireland, my father told me; they’d brought them with them over the ocean, and now they resided where pigs screamed and wild dogs howled in the bushes as whisperers in the dark.
My sister Andy and I would be expected to worship them, when we were older, which was why I later fled. Real or not, I came to know those gods to be unnatural, a night madness, and I feared that whatever sickness had turned my parents from the world and towards them would soon take me, as well.
I should have run right after Andy died. Before I, too, began to share in my parents’ beliefs.
My sister was a year younger than I, and a source of fathomless irritation, clinging to my side always through the loneliness of having no other friend in that desolate country, there being no other houses in the vicinity for miles.
I loved Andy, but I did not like her, taking great pleasure in inventing games whose terms put a relieving distance between us.
It was such play that lead to Andy’s death: I dared her to enter the Outback, and walk until she could no longer see our house on the horizon.
We were both terrified of the place, and with sensible cause. Our parents had been city people, long ago, and knew the Outback no better than we did; they told us of the animals that roamed there, the deaths of nameless wanderers through thirst and heatstroke, and at the hands of wicked men in the endless red.
Like the forests of fairytales we learned to dread the waste on our doorstep, and it was for this reason I demanded Andy go out there: I didn’t think she would.
She’d beg for a Truth over the Dare, or abandon the game altogether, and slink to sulk in the belly of the house. It had worked before, with other requests too outlandish or dangerous to be practiced. But it was perhaps the memory of those events that compelled Andy to accept, for although her round face blanched she turned and began to walk into the Outback with determined little steps at once.
I laughed aloud, thinking it was only a matter of time before she realised her folly and turned back. Her shoes were soft and thin, her bare head unprotected from the searing eye of the afternoon sun— she’d trip on a stone, or complain of the heat, and home she’d trot in forlorn defeat, and I would laugh again.
That was our routine, how all our games ended. Yet Andy walked on, a frail doll with a fog of dandelion hair, pushing between short scrubs of bushes with both hands.
Amazed, I called after her, running back and forth along the perimeter of the land that I dared not cross for as many superstitious fears as practical.
“Andy, you idiot! Don’t go! I didn’t mean it!”
She neither answered nor looked over her shoulder, only picked her way through stones and tussles of dry grass until she was a detail scribbled on the skyline, then was gone.
I lingered for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, hoping fretfully for her return. It struck me that perhaps she was hiding somewhere, punishing me with my own agitation; I’d certainly never suggest such a dare again, and would have let her win all our games gladly.
But when a full hour had gone by I knew, with an acute dread, that something had happened to Andy, that she lay snake-bitten, or dingo dragged along the red, red earth.
I knew I had to go to her, to help her if I could, as dangerous as it was to go where she had. My parents, still absent, had driven out into the nearest town that day for supplies, and we had no telephone in the house. I, alone, was left to cross the bridge of land between me and my sister.
After filling a flask with water at the kitchen sink, I mustered the nerve to set out after Andy, half sobbing with fear before I was even ten steps across its crimson miles. The sun mauled the back of my neck, and every cry and scuffle in the underbrush made me start in contemplation of what grinning animals observed my entrance to their territory.
Now and then I called my sister’s name, begging her to come to me. There was no answer, no flash of yellow hair across the sandstone plains. I sensed, then, what I would later find after an hour of walking, felt it like a splinter beneath my nail, hurting each soft part of me.
I knew that it was my fault, that I myself had caused it with my childish rejection of the only sibling and companion I possessed. Guilt lay across me like a dog, and by the time I found Andy, star-sprawled, face down, beneath a stunted tree, I was addled with the pain of having hated the sister I loved.
I cried until I was sick, heaving in sour gulps in the company of the cooling body.
To this day I still don’t know which of all the thousand means of dying was Andy’s. She may have tripped and struck her head on a stone, run foul of a snake, or some other passing beast; I didn’t have the stomach to roll her onto her back to look for unseen wounds.
All I knew was that she was dead, flies and black-shelled beetles gleaming across one cold, outstretched hand.
Andy was too heavy for me to carry or drag back home with me again. I tried, and at once felt dizzied by the effort, leaning against the tree until the beat of my heart slowed enough for me to think.
It was as I stood there that an inexplicable surge of new terror came over me, the same I felt as I watched my parents head out to commune with their spirits in the night.
Though it was broad daylight, that sense cored me through like some dead peach, and it occurred to me, as I looked at Andy again, that she had had no accident.
That her reasons for trespassing the Outback against her every instinct were not, after all, only hers.
*
By luck alone I returned home unharmed, though I was limp and nauseous from heat, and from the fear that fell upon me like a hunter’s net as I ran. Night had dropped across the land, drenching everything but the house with its un-colour.
My parents’ car was in the driveway; relieved, I plunged through the front door and fell, sobbing, to my burnt knees, wringing my mother’s dress in wretched fistfuls.
In a fit of stammering I told them what I had done, that Andy lay dead in the scarlet dust an hour’s walk from the house. My mother and father listened without expression– dull with shock, I thought, at first, or else gone mad with it, as people do when they lose their children.
Then my father laid one thick hand on my arm and said, warmly, “It’s alright, Sara. Andy isn’t dead. She’s come back to us.”
“Your Dad’s right,” said my mother, kissing me on one sweat-sodden temple. “The spirits brought her home. Look.”
She nodded to a chair drawn back from the kitchen table, which was empty, a full glass of water sitting, untouched, across from it.
“She’s right here,” my mother said, as I stared, bewildered, at the vacant seat. “Changed a bit, but they told us that’d happen. Isn’t easy, bringing someone back, after… well. We’re just grateful they did.”
I looked up into her eyes, and into the eyes of my father, each blue as the sea our ancestors had crossed to this country, surrounded by the sick and the dead, and in them I saw a fanatical belief I knew I could not change.
Still I said, “Andy’s not there, Mum. Dad. She isn’t. I saw her—”
“It wasn’t her,” my father cut in, with a harsh finality. “Not anymore. This is Andy, now, alright?”
If I’d believed my parents had lost their minds I would only have been miserable, knowing my sister would never be buried, that I must grow, gesturing to an imagined shadow of Andy until I was old enough to leave.
Yet as I peered into the vacuum of absence on the kitchen chair it no longer seemed empty, or else it was as if that emptiness watched us three, and listened.
Something alive, in the deadness of shadow.
“Andy’s not there,” I said again, but this time with another meaning.
I couldn’t be certain whether what I felt was indeed some presence, or if, in mourning, I’d begun to share the delusion of two lost adults, and to feel what was not there. But that the nothing was not Andy I knew with an intensity I’d later induce myself to forget.
“Go to your room,” said my father, roughly. “When you come out you’re going to apologise to your sister. Do you hear me?”
He gestured as he spoke; the pointing hand shook with a righteous indignance. My mother rose quietly to stand beside him, and I saw in the set of their tall figures that I would have to go along with their pretence as though I had all their faith in it.
I flew to my room in the tears of my first loss, then in the horror that Andy’s death had blown open a door to something worse.
Later that night my mother came to me, not with comfort, but to bring my new, formless sister to her bed on the other side of the room. I watched as our mother whispered and kissed the air above the pillow, crooning in undertones I couldn’t quite catch, nor cared to.
With a stubborn shrug I pulled the sheets over my head and kept them there until I was alone again— alone, that is, but for the absence I was to call Andy.
The room was quiet, the silence of the kind between two people choosing not to speak, for reasons of their own. Disturbed, I turned on my side to face the wall, not wanting to look at the uninhabited bed, a threatening oblong in the dark.
The sense of that space watching the back of my head as I attempted to sleep was almost worse.
Only through weariness did I drowse, blinking awake some time in the early morning to the sound of someone turning in the second bed.
I lay, rigid as a pebble on my mattress, my eyes struggling to adjust to the semi night. It seemed that there was something under the covers of Andy’s bed, a raised lump of her approximate size and shape, moving subtly in the gloom. I thought of her stiff body, face down in the tributaries of knotted roots, and began to spasm in terror, knowing that she was not—could not be—the sleeper in her bed.
As I watched, the shape under the covers sat sharply upright, black against the greater blackness of the dark, and with a scream I thrust my face into my pillows, as though to hide from the sight of horror made one safe from it.
I heard the sliding of weight from the bed onto the floorboards, the rhythmic pat of footsteps, approaching me, pausing as though to lean across my covered form— the sense of its proximity was like some awful magnetism, that which, in opposition, repels.
Then the feeling was gone, and when, after some minutes, I glanced across to Andy’s bed again it was as empty, only the folded-back corner of one sheet implying that it had ever been occupied, to begin with.
*
The days, the weeks, and years that followed were excruciating in the theatre I was forced to engage in to appease my parents. I was not allowed to ignore the presence they called Andy, or ever to imply that she was anything but my sister; my mother and father seemed to be afraid that I’d insult the spirits they worshipped, one of which perhaps now lived among us.
It attended lessons, sat at meals—the food was never touched, only went cold on Andy’s plate—and, in the long afternoons, was encouraged to play with me, though in the early days I would beg my parents to be left alone. After my father one day raised his hand as though thinking to strike me for the first time I learned to abandon these attempts and do as they told me.
Even in daylight I couldn’t shift the chill that came of looking into the space where she was meant to be standing, tricking myself into glimpsing an outline, or seeing some object inexplicably moved, where likely there was nothing at all.
I could never decide whether I had dreamt having seen her in my room, or if I was beginning to witness the things my parents did, groomed into my becoming as their servant.
I feared my own descent into their crazed theology, which—through a child’s decisive whims—I’d never had faith in, thought I’d been raised to know nothing else.
But I was a little girl tormented with the guilt of loss, desperate to connect with even a delirious echo of Andy rather than face the fact of her death.
I couldn’t bear to think of her as bones in the Outback, exposed to the elements and the wandering appetite of animals. Better to tell myself my parents’ story, and believe that in some form she was alive.
Yet as time drew on, and my mother and father began to teach me the ways of their worship, I beheld that they, too, were uncertain as to whether the spirit was, in fact their daughter; they only hoped it was, and took great pains to be silent of their doubt.
That the adults I looked to as leaders in all things were no more enlightened than I was disillusioned me even as I grew into their beliefs.
I began to hear the voices in the dark, though I could not yet understand them.
Slowly, I made my plans to leave the house. Having driven to town with my father for errands on occasion, I had seen that there were methods in which I could slope off into the streets and pay my way forward with the little money I’d stolen and hidden away over the years. I’d sleep outdoors, and beg favours of strangers, and scrape on my knees until I found a handhold somewhere.
All this I would do, but not until my fourteenth birthday had passed, and I knew for certain that there was nothing left in the house by the Outback to stay for. Not my parents, who had invited madness in, and not my sister, who was a husk under a eucalyptus tree, her soul whisked free like dirt scattered on a sanguine wind.
The day was like any other, although my parents sang to me, and claimed that the shadow sang, too. I stared into the haze of air with its lifeless quiet, and heard nothing.
The fear of perceiving a voice and recognising it—or not recognising it—was through me like a germ, and I was ill with it, as mad as my mother, as wild as my father.
I hadn’t yet been taught how to commune with the dark, but I vowed to try it once my parents had gone to bed. The emptiness I shared a room with compelled me with the need to understand it, to know if there was something there, or if I had birthed, from my unhappiness, a life that had become real to me.
I sat up on the night of my birthday, a young woman now only the quarter of a child, and faced the bed that had been my sister’s, my fingers, on the sheets, like flints of ice.
“Andy,” I said. “Is it really you? I’m sorry about what happened. What I did. Will you speak to me?”
No answer, no breath in the grate of the dark.
Still, I didn’t believe that it was empty. I’d never been alone since that day I’d walked, grieving, through the wilds, for all that I’d once prayed to be.
“Please, Andy, I miss you,” I said, to the gloom, then, “Say something. You’re scaring me.”
Invoking those words into the shadows was a mistake, for suddenly it was as though I was in the Outback again, the heat and all the sounds of starving life in that small room.
I smelled the sugar-meat stink of death, and as I looked on something sat up in my sister’s bed, facing the headboard, so I all saw of it was falling hair.
Not hair— for as I stared longer at that shape I understood that it was built from strings of shadow, like smokewebs made by a candlewick left too long uncut. There was no face in it, no eyes, only an approximation of a human figure, something crayon-drawn upon the paper of the night.
A voice came from it, a whisper. A child’s voice, almost, but high and hoarse, a pretender’s attempt at my sister.
“Sara.”
*
In the morning I ran from the South, through half a dozen mining towns. Ran from my parents’ madness, and the little body forgotten in the roots and dirt, and from my name, uttered by a shadow.
But though I’ve forgotten the ways of my old worship the night still speaks to me, and I know that it—or whatever inhabits its plains—sees me as its sister.
The Morgue 