Chapter 40
A SECOND SKETCHPAD
Despite my determination to ignore Rafe Vandenberg, I take the drawing to him as soon as my shift ends.
I don’t have a choice. If anyone can verify the identity of the faceless man, it’s him.
Mr. Tulane invites me inside. I hurry up the stairs and go straight to Rafe’s bedroom.
His door is open. He stands at his open armoire, buttoning his shirt from the bottom up, staring at his reflection in a mirror set inside the armoire’s door.
I catch sight of his bare upper half and stop dead in my tracks. Not because of his well-defined chest, but because of the violent slashes carved into it.
My breath catches, loud enough to hear.
Rafe turns around and my caught breath escapes in a gasp.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
In a rare gesture of modesty, he spreads his hand over the fresh scarring, like doing so might hide what I have already seen.
I march inside his room and pull his arm away so I can get a better look. Claw marks. A violent slash of them, straight down his chest. Pink and raised, like the wounds have only just healed.
Rafe clears his throat.
And I realize, quite suddenly, that I am touching the claw marks. As if of their own volition, my fingers have traced the length of them.
His eyes meet mine, and for a heartbeat, the air between us crackles.
I draw in a breath and step quickly away.
“Don’t stop on my account,” he says.
Heat crawls up my neck and into my ears. I think my hair might be blushing. Swallowing thickly, I take one more small step backward and repeat my question. “What happened to you?”
“My time in the Overlay wasn’t exactly a summer picnic, Selah.” He finishes buttoning his shirt. “I had an unfortunate altercation with one of Dr. Psycho’s devil dogs. Thankfully, I fared a bit better than poor Lily.”
Lily.
The reason I came.
I blink several times, as if doing so might clear away the shocking sight of his wounds.
Rafe pops his collar, then lifts an eyebrow at the paper I have in my hand. “Did you bring me something?”
I give it to him. “You said he didn’t have a face. You said it was all blurred like a burn victim.”
He stares at the charcoal sketch.
“Is that him?” I ask.
He cocks his head and examines it for a moment longer. Then he hands it back with a look of boredom. “It would appear so.”
“Lily Vandenberg drew this.”
“Fascinating,” he says, sounding utterly un-fascinated.
“But…” I hold up the drawing, bewildered. “How is that possible?”
He grabs a silk tie. “Perhaps she visited the Overlay and met the guy before the curse gobbled her up.”
My brow furrows.
It’s possible, I guess. Simon went into the Overlay. My mother went with him. It’s not that farfetched to think Lily could have done the same. But it feels wrong, like a discordant note in a familiar song.
“There’s something else,” I tell him as he knots his tie with practiced ease. “The clock in the Vandenberg exhibit is missing.”
He feigns shock.
“You don’t think that’s odd?”
“Not particularly.”
I stare at him, uncomprehending.
He rolls his eyes. “Selah, how many curious visitors do you suppose have made their way up to Maggie’s second floor to admire that display over the past week?”
“Enough for her to install a stanchion.”
“Exactly,” he says, folding his collar down. “If I had to guess, I’d say one of your podcast groupies took it. It’s probably being sold on eBay as we speak.”
I shake my head. I don’t buy it.
I don’t think he does either.
I think he’s remembering the same thing I’m remembering.
When I held the pearl inside the crypt, the torchlights flared white, and when the haze cleared, both of us saw it—a glimpse of a clock exactly like the one from that display.
That night, I review everything I know about Lily Vandenberg, a girl who was no stranger to trouble.
Skinny dipping in the quarry. Graffitiing public property.
Marijuana use. Underage drinking. A bit like Lola Hayes, to be honest. Only instead of living in a trailer park with her mom, she lived in a giant mansion with her parents and her brother.
She spent her childhood in the eighties.
Her teen years in the nineties.
Then she vanished off the face of the earth in 1995.
Only she didn’t really vanish.
She was a victim of the Vandenberg curse, triggered by her brother, who fell in love with my mother.
She also liked to draw. And somehow, amidst all her artwork, she captured the creepy faceless man who is—according to Rafe—Dr. Psycho.
I flip through the pages of her sketchbook.
The charcoal drawings start off normal enough. Staircases that go nowhere. Chandeliers drawn in meticulous detail. Gnarled trees with exposed roots. A few thorny roses, their petals dripping with dew.
The first disturbing image is the back of a girl, her shadow stretching long and wrong beneath her with too many limbs. It’s not terribly dark, but unsettling enough to serve as a transition, a warning of what’s to come on the pages that follow.
Grotesque monsters. Angular demons. Winged creatures that look unnervingly similar to the terrifying birds that attacked Twig, Kate, and me outside St. Fortuna’s.
And on the very last page is the most disturbing sketch of them all—a girl pulling something dark out of her chest, her eyes crossed out, her mouth sewn shut.
I hold it up to the light next to the drawing of the faceless man.
Somehow, Lily drew Vorat, a Hollow Walker hunting teenagers in Foggy Hollow.
The same Hollow Walker who likely hunted my own mother.
Maybe he’s been hunting people for centuries.
Maybe all the disappearances in Randolph county between now and its beginning can be traced back to Dr. Psycho.
Maybe his whole lair is filled with human bones and prisoners waiting to become bones and he has been feasting on them all.
Maybe my mother is already bones.
Even as I think the horrible thought, something stubborn rises within me.
Because why? What would be the point of the seed and the plant and the visions if my mother is already dead?
I feel like there has to be a point to the things I have seen, to the things that moon-eyed creature showed me. It can’t just be a coincidence.
I fall asleep staring at the sketch.
When I wake the next morning, Lily is still on my mind.
So I head to Evermore.
Not to work, but to look.
The sketchpad I took from the basement was one of several items languishing in a crate. Perhaps I missed something the first time—a clue that might explain how she drew a picture of Vorat before she was sucked inside the Overlay and killed by one of his hounds.
On my way to the bookstore, I grab biscuits from Tudor’s to share with Walt and Maggie.
“You aren’t on the schedule today,” she says over a cup of steaming tea while Walt unwraps his biscuit enthusiastically.
“I know,” I reply. “I wanted to do some work in the basement.”
They assume this work involves the podcast.
It’s an assumption I don’t correct.
Downstairs, however, I bypass the table with our recording equipment and make myself comfortable on the floor in front of the crates. I focus my attention on the one filled with items that seem to have come from Lily’s bedroom.
Harper left the Magic 8 Ball on top.
“Did Lily visit the Overlay before she was sucked inside?” I ask it, giving the ball a shake before turning it over.
Inside the viewing window, the many-sided die floats in blue liquid, stuck between answers.
It is decidedly so.
Outlook not so good.
I remove the bag of glow-in-the-dark stars, the hot pink corded phone, a snow globe of the Eiffel tower, and Lily’s boombox.
It’s a Sony Mega Bass, sleek and black with a dual cassette deck and a top loading CD player.
Underneath it, inside the crate, is a scattered pile of cassette tapes and CDs, most of them featuring Madonna and Kate Bush.
I plug the boombox into an outlet and acquaint myself with how the cassettes work. I start with Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos. Like a Prayer and The Immaculate Collection by Madonna. I try a few by Kate Bush. The Tuesday Night Music Club by Sheryl Crow, and then Happy Nation by Ace of Base.
While everything else has been edgy, introspective, and artsy, Ace of Base sounds like bubblegum.
I return to the crate, pulling out a plastic, purple caboodle. There are two vials of perfume inside, lip gloss, a velvet choker, a few silver charms, and a vibrant collection of curled up snap bracelets.
I remove a gallon-sized bag of nail polish and discover a stack of magazines underneath—Seventeen, Vogue, Sassy, Rolling Stone—with a mailing label on every cover, typed with Lily’s name and address, except for a random copy of The New Yorker at the bottom, which is addressed to Simon and smells like clove.
I think that’s it.
That’s all there is.
I’ve reached the last of Lily’s things.
But when I pull out The New Yorker, I discover another sketchpad at the very bottom, half the size of the first, along with four stray cassette tapes. They aren’t in plastic cases. They aren’t even labeled.
I open the newly discovered sketchpad, expecting more of the same. What I find instead has my fingers fluttering to the page, my brain stuttering in sheer bewilderment.
A perfect depiction of Clara Green.
Lily sketched my teenage mother in stunning detail. And here it is, in Maggie’s basement. Right under my nose all this time while Twig and I recorded our podcast. Just like the yearbook at school, patiently waiting to be discovered.
I turn the page and gasp.
The drawing reminds me of The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only instead of God and Adam reaching for one another, surrounded by a host of angels and cherubs, it’s my mother and Simon, their faces filled with torment, the angels and cherubs replaced by shadows and demons.
On the next page, my mother is weeping.
On the one after that, she’s hunched in a corner wearing a straight jacket.
I stop breathing.
Because this is impossible.
Utterly impossible.
Lily couldn’t have known my mother would be committed to a psych ward. She couldn’t have even known Simon and my mother would be torn apart. And yet, somehow, she drew these things.
I flip to a self-portrait that has a clammy chill creeping across my skin. Four violent slashes have been drawn down the length of Lily’s face. The charcoal is dark, the drawing itself overworked, the page nearly torn through.
“Claw marks,” I whisper.
On the next page, a skeletal wolf with eyes that are strangely human stares up at me. After that, a pair of fastidiously drawn masculine hands with shackled wrists. And finally, on the very last page, a second picture of the faceless man.
I sit cross-legged on the cold, concrete floor with the sketchpad in my lap.
I don’t understand.
These drawings shouldn’t be possible.
But then, neither was the portrait—Ezra’s Obsession, a painting of me centuries before I existed. I live in a world of curses and fallen angels and magical amulets, and in this world, these drawings aren’t impossible.
I set the sketchbook aside and examine one of the blank cassette tapes carelessly tossed into the bottom of the crate. I slot it into the boombox, rewind to the beginning, and push play.
It takes me a moment to process what I’m hearing.
Not music, but a girl’s voice speaking into the silence.
“Today is Saturday, December thirty-first, and my head feels like it’s going to crack in two. I drank way too much last night…”
A thrill of excitement shoots through my body.
This is Lily.
She recorded herself talking.
“Dad is furious, of course. Grounded for life, per usual. Gotta love it when that vein in his forehead starts bulging.” The words are followed by a huff of indignation and the squeaking of bed springs, like she has just plopped onto a mattress.
“Sometimes, I hate him so much I want to scream. Does he really think my golden boy brother doesn’t drink, too? ”
I come to my knees and pull out the other cassettes while Lily Vandenberg tells her story.