Blood on Her Tongue

Set in the Netherlands in 1887, the story follows Lucy Goedhart, a quiet young woman employed as a companion to an elderly widow named Mrs. van Dijk. Lucy receives a frantic letter from her twin sister, Sarah Schatteleyn, describing blinding headaches and a malevolent female presence inside her head. A telegram from Sarah's husband, Michael Schatteleyn, follows: Sarah is deathly ill, and Lucy must come at once to the family estate, Zwartwater.

The crisis began weeks earlier, when peat cutters on Michael's land unearthed a centuries-old bog body, a corpse naturally preserved by the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions of the peat. The body was female, buried face down, staked through its joints, with a large stone crammed between its shattered jaws. Sarah, a fiercely intelligent amateur scientist, sketched the body obsessively. While trying to extract the stone, she cut her knuckles on the broken teeth, staining the bog woman's mouth with blood. She had an intrusive thought that the body was thirsty. Arthur Hoefnagel, the local doctor and the twins' childhood friend, performed an autopsy and found the body completely hollow: No organs remained, only a shrunken mass threaded with grayish roots inside the skull.

Lucy arrives at Zwartwater carrying a lifelong fear that she is the lesser twin, a shadow to Sarah's vivid presence. She finds her sister gaunt and delirious. Sarah warns Lucy to leave, raving that "she" has killed before and is hungry, then bites Arthur's arm and drinks his blood when he tries to give her water. Over the following days, Sarah refuses all food. Arthur administers blood transfusions from Michael, himself, Lucy, and Katje, Michael's young relative who lives at the estate.

Sarah briefly regains lucidity, but when Lucy mentions a note Sarah scrawled comparing the bog woman to a tick, Sarah becomes terrified, screams to get "it" out of her head, and rams a silver pen into her own eye. She dies from the wound. The household agrees to call it an accident. Lucy sits vigil over the body and reads hidden diary pages she had earlier discovered behind Sarah's vanity mirror, which describe a sleepwalking episode in which the bog woman forced something from her mouth into Sarah's. Lucy burns the pages and all other evidence of Sarah's condition.

Through flashbacks, the novel reveals Lucy fell in love with Michael before he met Sarah and married her instead. Their affair began after Michael's daughter Lucille died of scarlet fever and Sarah experienced a mental health crisis. Lucy broke off the relationship and took the position with Mrs. van Dijk to create distance. On the night before the funeral, she and Michael resume their affair, leaving Lucy consumed with guilt.

At the funeral, Lucy hears scratching from inside the sealed coffin. Arthur dismisses the sounds as decomposition gases and proposes marriage, but Lucy insists he open the lid. Sarah sits up, brushes the veil from her face, and announces she is starving.

Part II follows the uneasy aftermath. Sarah is alive but deeply wrong. A fungus grows inside her empty eye socket. She cuts off her own hair to conserve energy, curses constantly, and refuses almost all food despite claiming to be ravenous. When Lucy accidentally cuts her tongue on a teacup, Sarah seizes the cup and drinks the blood-tinged liquid with visible ecstasy.

Lucy investigates the bog woman's identity. A gold ring found in the peat field leads her, Michael, and Mrs. van Dijk to a local archive, where they discover court proceedings from 1559 detailing a farmer's murder of his wife. He believed she had become a changeling, a supernatural impostor. After disappearing for two weeks, the woman returned behaving strangely: She spooked animals, had unnatural appetites, seemed impervious to pain, and smelled like a corpse. He killed her by forcing a stone into her mouth and staking her in the bog. The parallels to Sarah are unmistakable.

Lucy returns home to find Sarah drinking Katje's menstrual blood. She confronts Sarah by secretly driving a hatpin into her hand during an embrace. Sarah does not feel it, and the pin produces black, foul-smelling blood. After a prolonged confrontation, Sarah's face goes slack, and she asks what gave her away.

Not-Sarah, as Lucy begins to think of her, explains her nature. She is a parasite akin to a tick, capable of hibernating for centuries. She consumed the original bog woman's organs to survive in the peat and was revived by Sarah's blood from the cut on her knuckles. She entered Sarah's brain and tried to take control. Sarah fought back by starving herself, which is why she bit Arthur for blood. The pen through her eye was Sarah's desperate attempt to kill the parasite; it wounded the creature but killed Sarah instead. At the moment of merger, Not-Sarah absorbed all of Sarah's memories, emotions, and personality. She insists she is functionally Sarah and begs Lucy to help her feed: She needs fresh human meat and blood to repair the decaying body.

Lucy reasons that a person is the sum of their thoughts and feelings, and Not-Sarah possesses Sarah's. She resigns from Mrs. van Dijk's service, and she and Katje cut their own arms to provide blood, but the measure is temporary. A vicious argument erupts between Lucy and Not-Sarah over the ethics of killing to feed. Not-Sarah accuses Lucy of being spineless; Lucy retorts that Sarah was a parasite long before one consumed her brain.

The situation collapses when Not-Sarah bites off three of Mrs. van Dijk's fingers. Arthur and Michael decide to commit Not-Sarah to an asylum. They chloroform Lucy when she resists and transport Not-Sarah to Arthur's house. Lucy escapes by striking her guard, Magda, Sarah's lady's maid, with a chamber pot and walks for three hours across the dark moors.

She finds Michael alone at Arthur's house. He declares the matter settled: Sarah will be committed. When Michael initiates a sexual encounter, Lucy gouges out both his eyes with her thumbs, then stabs him in the throat with her fountain pen. He pulls the pen out, severing his artery, and bleeds to death. Arthur returns, assumes Sarah committed the murder, and proposes framing Sarah and committing her permanently while he marries Lucy. He reveals he has known about the affair all along. When Lucy resists, Arthur grows violent, insisting he will remove Sarah from Lucy's life. Lucy slashes his throat with a scalpel.

Not-Sarah drags herself downstairs from where she had been drugged and locked. She announces she will consume Michael's entire body, which will sustain her for over a year. They plan to dispose of Arthur's body in the bog and flee with Katje. Lucy confesses to having been Michael's mistress. Not-Sarah reveals she has always known but holds no grudge, admitting her own guilt in marrying the man Lucy loved. Not-Sarah cleans the blood from Lucy's hands by licking each finger, then presses Lucy's palm against her cheek. Lucy laughs softly.

A final newspaper article reports the mysterious disappearance of Lord and Lady Schatteleyn and Lucy Goedhart from the doctor's house on a dark, foggy night. Police suspect they wandered into the bogs and drowned, and the article suggests dredging the black waters to discover what horrors might lurk within.