Chapter V. 2007 #4
Sinful. A bad daughter. A bad woman.
HER PARENTS SPENT the rest of the day at the church. Her father there to counsel anyone who came to him in their shock and grief. Her mother there as a show of support. The calm, beautiful face of The Path’s divine leader.
They sent Camilla home with the driver.
“Stay inside,” her mother said before crushing her in a hug.
Her father had already turned away, his hand extended to the next church leader with something to say about Tania Fullerton.
How very sorry they all were. How awful, how selfish it was for someone to take their own life, if that’s what happened.
What a burden this illness was. What other specialists could they possibly find who would finally provide some answers?
What could they do to protect their wives and daughters?
Camilla had heard it all before, and it was no less tiresome. She leaned against the window, eyes closed, until the driver told her they’d arrived.
The house was quiet when she let herself inside, but she knew she was not alone.
She could sense the heat of them, tucked away in their hidey-holes, doing the work Pastor Burson had the goodwill of providing them.
The silent eye of the outside cameras watching to make certain she did not venture past those opulent walls.
Among them, someone was tasked with watching her.
Making sure she stayed inside, doing as she was told.
Camilla was sure of it. She wandered into the kitchen, but she wasn’t really hungry.
She ate four grapes. A string cheese. A handful of dark chocolate–covered almonds.
And then, because the kitchen was empty and no one was there to tell her not to, she poured a chilled glass of sauvignon blanc and carried it up to her bedroom.
Settled on her bed, she sipped at the wine as she pulled up her text messages and stared at Brianna’s name. Before she could think, she typed.
I saw them. The Dark Sisters. At least, I think I did. It could have been a dream, but it felt so real. She stopped. Exhaled. Typed again. I’m sorry. I miss you.
Her finger hovered over the send button.
It would be pointless to send it. There were no phones allowed while on Retreat.
Brianna wouldn’t even see it. Or, even worse, her parents had her phone, and they would see it instead.
With a sigh, she tossed the phone and took another sip, wishing she’d brought the bottle with her.
Back down the stairs she went into the unnatural stillness of the house, where she filled her glass and grabbed the bottle.
She paused on the landing, unnerved by the emptiness of the house and called out, “Angela?”
Normally, the housekeeper would pop out from wherever she was scrubbing or dusting something, an affable smile on her face as she asked what she could do for Camilla.
But the house remained still, and Camilla felt the emptiness of all those rooms pressing down on her.
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe she was alone.
The news of Tania Fullerton sending everyone scuttling back to their own houses, doors shut against whatever terrible thing had killed her.
Or influenced her to do it herself. Camilla shivered and went back to her room and locked herself in.
The hours melted away in a wine haze, and by four, Camilla emerged from her bedroom and searched the house, room by room, but there was nothing to find.
Each door led to more emptiness. More silence.
She’d been alone the entire time. It was a surreal feeling to know she imagined she wasn’t.
It made her feel as if she couldn’t trust her own instincts.
To have sensed a presence in the house even though she was alone.
Her stomach churned with indecision. She could go to the tree now, before her parents returned. Take a quick look around and come right back. But they’d been at the church all day. They could come home while she was gone, and how would she explain it if they found an empty house?
But did any of it really matter? It was likely only a matter of time before her father sent her on Retreat anyway. Brianna’s theory proven correct but delayed because of Tania Fullerton’s death. Why not risk it and go out with a bang?
“Just a story,” she whispered to herself—Noah’s words offered her no comfort—and then opened the door and stepped outside, tracing her typical path that led her past the cameras’ watch.
Walking would take longer, but she didn’t want to chance the drive.
It would be more conspicuous than approaching on foot.
Within minutes, she was sweating. Attracted to her warmth, mosquitoes found the exposed bits of skin and drank deeply.
It felt like a dream. Her feet retracing the same steps she took only the night before, carrying her toward death even as her body wanted to turn around and go home. Screamed for it. But she had to see. Had to know if what she saw was real.
With each step, the smell of wood rot and damp moss rose around her, the forest itself staining her clothes and skin so she could not forget she’d been inside it.
Later, she could scrub it away. Once she saw the tree, she could bury her fear and go back to being the girl she used to be.
A girl excited for the Purity Ball. A girl who believed the Sisters were only a story.
She slowed as she approached the clearing where the tree stood, her breath catching, and then pushed through.
The earth was still blackened from where they set up the fire, and the tree arched above. If she wasn’t shivering, if there wasn’t the police tape’s accusatory yellow around the tree, she might have found it beautiful. Everything tranquil.
If there had been blood, some officer had washed it away. Heart pounding, she ducked under the tape.
She did not look at the bark, at those twisted mouths forever locked in a scream, but her fingers traced over it as if she could memorize the patterns beneath, her skin absorbing whatever sort of terrible heart might beat at its center.
Even in the day’s heat, her body felt cold. Lethargic. Birdsong filled the air, and it should have reassured her. A haunting could not happen in the daylight. Monsters were reserved for dark closets, not open fields and trees.
She searched the branches, the leaves a green blur opening to reveal the sky beyond, but there was nothing there. No braided hair or gaping mouths. No Dark Sisters.
“Where the fuck are you?” she said. The wind swallowed her voice and whipped it away from her. What had she hoped for in coming out here? That the women she saw would crawl out of the tree and tell her there was nothing to worry about? Just devils here, keep it moving.
Still, her body held an unnatural chill, her bones moving under her skin in a way that made it feel as if there were wasps trapped there, a buzzing that made her want to dig her fingers into her thighs and tear them out, and she turned from the tree.
Her hand was still pressed to its bark when she heard something sigh. Such a small sound—the lightest exhalation—but it fixed her in place and left every muscle trembling against the need to turn and see what it was.
Slowly, so slowly, she let her head turn, let herself look up into the branches that tasted Tania’s blood and once held something that was supposed to only be a story. A nightmare spun out of gossamer thread.
Two sets of eyes stared down at her, the bodies unnaturally bent as they leaned toward Camilla, their hair bound together so they moved as a single entity.
Together they opened their bleeding mouths, those pale eyes taking in every part of her as if weighing out what to eat first, and she could not move, could not even so much as breathe as those mouths twisted, their fingers skittering over the bark as they reached for her.
Every inch of Camilla’s body screamed at her to run, to move, to do something other than stand there stupidly staring up at the Dark Sisters, at this nocturnal hallucination she’d brought to life, but she couldn’t.
Couldn’t do anything but watch as they crept closer, as they buried broken, bleeding fingers into the bark and crawled down the tree.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no.” There were no other words.
Nothing inside her that was worthy of the terror she felt.
Only a desperate need to keep them from reaching her and sinking their fingers and teeth into her, ripping and tearing until she was just another offering to the Sisters.
Gored through on the tree’s branches like Tania Fullerton as they lapped at her blood. Reduced her to a pile of skin.
Finally, her body responded, and she ran.
There was no sense of direction, only a blind need to get away, get away, get away, and she wondered if this would be her life now.
A series of terrible discoveries followed by her body trying to escape something that should not exist. Because they shouldn’t exist. The Sisters.
But they were here. There was no denying it any longer.
She’d seen them now for the second time.
It didn’t matter that her parents might be home, it didn’t matter that her hair had come undone, her face reddened and sweaty, her dress torn. There was only movement, the tree line receding behind her as she stumbled over an exposed root and then kept going.
The rear of her house rose up before her, and she flung herself toward it and then through the first door she saw, not caring if the cameras saw.
The house closed around her—walls, ceilings, doors—all illusions of safety that should make her feel better but didn’t.
She spun wildly, trying to orient herself in the house she’d grown up in, but the shadows, the room she stood in, were foreign, and she bit down on her tongue so she would not scream.
“Camilla? What are you doing?”