Chapter 1
THE LIAR
I wrap white knuckles around the worn leather of the old Ford’s steering wheel and try to keep from looking out the window.
Farther down the road, where the black tarmac chews itself into gravel, a cargo train bites along the rickety tracks, and red siren lights blare at me to stop.
But I don’t want to. The last thing I need is time to pause, to think, to have an opportunity to turn back, to glance over my shoulder and see the damned thing.
The bog.
Dammit, you’ve had enough time, Mila, a voice whispers.
My voice—I’d know if it weren’t. Would recognize dead prattles from the bog.
I’ve spent most of my measly twenty years picking out the difference, separating my own voice from those of the mingling dead and fitting them into neat, straight lines.
So, on occasion, when the two do cross, when they get mixed up in my brain and I can’t decipher reality from those murky, gray depths, at least I have a page of scribbles to refer to. To pull me up and out of the water.
Metaphorically speaking.
Metal, I remind myself. The taste of death in my mouth is metal.
The one thing separating my words from those of the dead. My therapist thinks it has something to do with blood—the taste of metal. Blood from the body. She doesn’t listen when I tell her the body was drained.
My fingers grip the wheel tighter, and I grind my teeth together.
Fear catches up to me, turning sour in my stomach.
The train takes for-fucking-ever and I sit here, like a goddamn idiot.
No one should be afraid of something that isn’t even alive.
Not really. Sure, the voices talk, but they’re dead.
Just a bunch of bodies rotting in the tar-black water, bloodless, floating somewhere in the liminal spaces.
I take a steadying breath and look up at the clattering cars blurring past—rusty red and brown, stained by a hundred years of iron-ore dust. Even my own lungs are probably tainted with the stuff. Maybe that’s what will kill me dead.
Or it will be the guilt.
It pulls on the left side of my neck again, the tendon greedily pressing against my skin, like a finger through nylon.
Don’t look, I tell myself. You can’t look.
But I don’t have to face it to recall the bog’s appearance from memory. It has been burned into my brain for the last year. Every inch of it. There are hundreds of bogs across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but this one is different.
Angrier.
Deadfall pines sticking up like exposed spines.
Stagnant water like stomach acid sparkling in the midday sun.
Water snakes licking through the gray-green algae choking the shores and creeping through the reeds.
Clumps of cattails and dry rushes luring you with the promise of sturdy ground, a foothold, only to give way beneath your weight when the bog opens gaping jaws to swallow you whole.
My body hums. No, I don’t need to look to remember. To know the truth of what lies beneath that glittering surface.
All those bodies.
It isn’t needed when I can still feel it. My skin swims and the lights on the track stop whirling. The gate lifts and I press the gas—gravel flying when the truck screeches over the tracks.
It’s easy—too easy—remembering the way the body felt beneath my skin. The cold, the squelching wet, the dead and murky gaze despite the voice being very much alive.
He had no eyes.
I shove away the words—try to, anyway—but my mind has been playing them on repeat ever since last summer, and I haven’t been able to stop. Four words, over and over and over, and I think they’ll make me insane.
Maybe they already have. I reach over and flick the blue hair tie on my wrist. Once, twice. My skin stings.
He had no eyes.
Three, four, five.
I turn the truck onto another gravel road, this one marked by a simple black-iron sign: Thomas Road.
Fuck me, I think. Fuck me.
I’ve chosen the worst way home without even realizing it. Just a gut reaction. My body remembering how much I used to love this drive.
Before.
The white house appears first, a sign skewered into the perfectly manicured grass. The red and black letters are peeling away, but I’ve driven by them enough times to know what it says by heart.
Go to church, or the devil will get you.
No one knows who put it in Reverend Byron’s yard all those years ago, but he has never bothered to take it down.
His truck is missing from the driveway—he’s probably out healing the town’s sinners—but the space isn’t empty.
Simon, his oldest son, lies beneath the underside of a beaten-up, baby-blue Ford, brown leather boots sticking out.
I slow my truck and roll down my window.
“Hey, asshole!” I holler over the sound of clinking wind chimes.
There is a crash of forehead against metal before he swings out from beneath the truck and starts spitting words that would curdle the stomachs of Credence Hollow’s most devout. His eyes narrow in on me, and another string of expletives leaves his mouth.
“Hello to you too.” I lean over the bench seat. Hot air billows in through the open window.
He is as tall, thick, and grotesque as I remember him.
All muscle and reaching hands, lingering and hungry eyes.
I do fast math in my head. At twenty-one, he is the typical all-American boy who has never had to fess up to anything in his whole life.
Never had to take the blame or the responsibility.
The poster child for everything wrong in this world.
We love to see it, Simon Byron, you absolute shithead.
He reaches his fingers up to the crown of his head and they come away sticky with blood.
“Didn’t know you were coming back to town, frog-face.”
I roll my eyes. Seriously? The best thing he can come up with is the stupid nickname he gave me in grade school?
I shove aside thoughts of the bog and wiggle my eyebrows. “Surprise, surprise, motherfucker!” Then I flip him the bird and peel out of there.
I know not to stick around too long after Simon has had some blood spilled.
The last time it happened was when his brother, Roe, punched him in the nose after Simon called me a word I will not be repeating, thank you very much.
I had never seen anything like it—the look that came over Simon’s face once he realized he was bleeding.
Shadows gathered beneath his eyes, like ink-blotting paper, and I thought for sure Roe would be dead by morning.
I swear, Simon Byron is going to kill someone one day.
Gravel and dust sprays out behind my ripping tires.
The trees turn into nothing short of tangled limbs, creating a dark canopy over the road.
I crank the music louder, letting the iron rhythm steel my nerves.
It is loud and screeching and fury-filled, and I settle into it.
Because maybe those things are exactly what I have become. So very angry.
Maybe that’s what happens to a girl who raises a body from the bog.
Maybe that’s what happens when she’s so scared, she puts the body back.
Three shrill beeps replace the rock and roll coming from the radio, and a staticky voice spills from the speakers.
“This is a special news bulletin. Police in Leo County today are still searching for local missing person, Owen Shelby, last seen the evening of June fifteenth by friends in a wooded area just outside Credence Hollow.”
A sharp sliver of ice inches its way between my ribs.
“Sheriff Lowell is asking that if you have any information concerning this case to please call the offices…”
A phone number follows, but I’m not paying attention.
Not to the voice coming from the radio, not on the way sweat is slicking my navel, the creases of my palms. No, I’m focused on my heart heaving in my chest. I count the quickening beats and pray I don’t have a heart attack at the ripe old age of twenty and crash my dead grandmother’s trusty, well-loved pickup truck.
I switch the radio off. Abandoned in my own wretchedness, I only stop when I spot the trailer. It is parked a way off the road, surrounded by year-old poplar growths, messy logging, and ruts in the mud. If I didn’t know better, I would think it was abandoned.
But I do know better.
The curl of black smoke gives it away. It coils from behind the gray-brown aluminum, licking up against the clear blue sky.
It doesn’t take long for the scent to carry through the AC unit of the old truck—burning pine logs, ash, the sweet tang of weed.
It is a welcoming smell, a comforting one, and for a moment, I let myself believe coming home for a few days won’t be so bad.
Maybe it can be like all the years before I left last summer.
But it’s a lie. Everything spilling from between my lips these days seems to be. Lie after lie after lie. And deep down, it’s stupid, so stupid. Nothing can be like what it was before.
Before the body.
Before I touched it and its eye sockets snapped open.
Before I killed it and sent it back to the bog.
The scent of smoke sours, and I press on the gas.
I don’t want to see him anyway—the boy in the trailer.
Because the last time I saw Roe Byron, he was helping me put that body back in the bog.
My nerves twitch and sharpen with the memory: the cool-like-butter surface of the still-ripe skin, the blackened lips, the cavernous hollows in its skull.
And the voice. God, I remember the voices more than anything else.
He had no eyes.
They were all saying those words.
A chorus of the dead.
The voices are not strangers. I’ve been hearing them since I was a little girl with braids and a smile too big for this world. Since the day I almost drowned in the bog and Grandma Ruby fished me out. She wove strands of my hair together between her leathery fingers and said:
“It’s a gift, Mila-May. One that takes a near-death experience to gain. The swamp is in us, and we are in the swamp. We must use our talents to help the poor souls trapped there. To give them peace.”