Fernanda
She knew, in some way, that she was in the old house at the foot of the mountain, but the Brake Inn Motel was gone. Outside this house was the void at the edge of reality. Outside the house was pure, utter nothing.
But here, inside the house, was a strange silver mirror.
She heard what Stanley—or the man inside Stanley—had said last night before he killed her.
Frank’s operation is well aware of your brother. There are men watching his house now. Miguel will be dead the minute you cross the border.
Fernanda stared and stared, searching the mirror, only to feel a gnawing realization take hold of her bones, a savage clarity.
And then a sound reached her from downstairs. Someone was weeping.
She turned from the mirror with both reluctance and relief. She knew, in her heart, that she was needed elsewhere. That she was here for a reason. That, just like in all her grandmother’s stories, she served a purpose, right along with everyone else.
On her way down the house’s stairs, she found postcards with blurry photographs littering every step. Postcards. Who had once told her about postcards?
The ground floor of the old house was as barren as the top. No furniture. No sign of habitation. The only difference was a terrible stench of blood that lingered in the air. Blood, and that urgent weeping.
Fernanda followed the sound of tears across the living room, past a padlocked door, and rounded a corner into what must have once been a dining room, though the thought of eating in this room nauseated her now. She’d found the source of the stench.
Bodies were stacked in piles around the room, strewn across the floor, slumped against the walls.
Blood coated them, their eyes wide with horror.
Their faces were horribly flat, like they’d been crushed in a massive press.
Blood oozed from their pores. Gray matter had dried in the shells of their ears.
Worst of all, every corpse in this room belonged to the same person.
Penelope.
Penelope Holiday, again and again and again. The girl had died a hundred times and been left here to rot.
Sitting in the midst of the carnage, plopped right down in a pool of blood, was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. One look at her, and Fernanda could see the child was Penelope’s sister—though, of course, on some level this made no sense.
Fernanda had picked up plenty by living at Frank’s house.
She knew that Penelope’s mother and sister had been shot in their beds long ago.
She even suspected that Frank (or someone in his operation) had hired the gunman, a specialist at these things, apparently.
Penelope’s mother, after all, had been planning to go to the FBI.
Dead or not, the little girl was here now, and she was wailing just like Miguel used to wail.
Adeline. The name came to Fernanda like a gift.
“Hello there.” Fernanda crouched down, right into the blood. What did she care if she ruined her jeans? “Adeline, can you hear me?”
The girl kept wailing. Fernanda patted her hair. Adeline pulled away.
“She’s dead,” the child said. “She’s dead, and I killed her.”
Fernanda looked at the stacked corpses. She doubted she would ever fully understand the consequences of the ceremony in which they had all become ensnared, but after watching the mirror upstairs, she had seen so many things.
She had seen the way time could be bent.
She understood, on some instinctive level, what she was seeing in this room.
“You did not kill her, child,” Fernanda said. “She died every night, right at the end, after you kept her safe for as long as you could. That is all you wanted to do, yes? To keep Penelope safe?”
Adeline blinked, her breath hitching. “I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I’m not dead. I don’t know why she is, and I’m not, and why is she here?”
Fernanda said, “I do not know much either, child. But I believe this house has served a purpose. It is the in-between space. It collects things. It shows things. And now that its purpose has been fulfilled, it is beginning to collapse.”
As if to prove her point, Fernanda glanced over her shoulder. The door through which she had entered was gone. In its place yawned that black void of nothing.
They could not stay here.
Adeline, too, saw the nothing. She started to wail again. “It’s over. I couldn’t save her, and it’s over!”
But it wasn’t. Because when Fernanda looked past Adeline, she saw that something was trying to help them.
The silver mirror from upstairs had moved. It leaned, now, against an empty patch of wall between two stacks of corpses.
Fernanda took a slow, steady breath. She knew what she needed to do.
She smoothed Adeline’s hair, brushed her cheek.
Then she said, “Have you heard the story about the little girl who met a fallen star?”