Chapter 28 Before
Before
The door is open. I’m alive. At first, these are such strange and overwhelming thoughts that the words I can make out from above still provide no meaning at all.
There’s only the cruel light and the fear and promise it brings.
And then there’s the sensation like the whole world has tilted forty degrees to the left and my mind can’t comprehend the new images it sees.
Get out get out get out, my mind has been screaming, the chorus that replaced the hundred more nuanced methods of survival: Beg. Smile. Obey. Bide your time.
They’re still arguing. It’s hard to tease apart their voices after so long hearing only the voices of the dead and the one who killed them. But now I’m picking them apart, stitching their names to their words.
I can’t make out much of what they’re saying, but it’s enough. Now Andrew is the only one seriously arguing against calling the police, but all of them are reeling. All of them want the excuse to wait, to think, to wrap their minds around this sudden heaving shift in their reality.
To wrap their minds around me, just as I’m wrapping my mind around them.
I have spent the last—-how long?—-weeks and months clamping my jaw shut around any scrap of survival I could get my teeth into.
I have been biddable and obedient, I have been sly, I have kept secrets, and I have bloodied my flesh against the cold confines of my prison.
I can be many things, to stay alive. Now I need to be someone new to survive them.
The arguing hasn’t flagged, but there’s a new sound—-the tentative scrape of a footstep on the stairs. A slim form creeps down, one step at a time, half hunched as if to make herself small. It’s the younger girl. Emily. Emmie.
The one who looks like me.
“Hello?” she says. I shudder. The voices of ghosts don’t so much as stir the air. I can feel the voice of this living girl like an impact on my skin.
I look up from where I sit against the wall, arms wrapped around my knees. She creeps forward, disgust and horror on her face. I wait and say nothing. I’m not sure I can speak at all.
“I brought you something,” she says, so softly it’s almost a whisper. She moves closer but stops a few feet away. Close enough that I could reach her without hitting the end of the chain. Even knowing that it’s broken, it’s hard to picture going farther than that.
I imagine the length of the thing looped around her neck, imagine calling her siblings down and offering a trade. But I’m too weak. Even this girl could overpower me.
I say nothing. She draws closer and takes something from her pocket. A granola bar in a foil wrapper.
I can’t help myself. I lunge, snatching it from her hand. She lets out a muffled cry and stumbles back, nearly falling. I tear open the wrapper and cram the whole thing in my mouth, barely tasting it as I wolf it down in three bites.
“Careful,” she says. “You’ll make yourself sick. If you haven’t eaten. You haven’t, have you?” The look in her eyes is more curiosity than pity. She creeps closer. “I have another. But you can’t eat it yet. You’ll throw it up if you do.”
My hands crab into claws. I force them to relax. She’s right. Already my stomach is cramping. “Water,” I say. It comes out a croak.
She considers, nods. “I’ll bring some.”
She looks so young. So beautiful, with those green eyes and pale skin. I have the urge to slice her open, see how easily that softness parts. I try not to imagine moth wings twitching in her eye sockets.
“How long have you been down here?” she asks.
My voice is a wreck, but I can speak. “What day is it?”
She blinks. “March thirteenth.”
I try to do the math, but time is crumpled here. I can’t smooth it out. “I think—-it was before Christmas,” I say. There were lights on the houses and the same five songs on the radio.
She nods slowly, like she, too, is running the numbers. Calculating the weight of that stretch of days and weeks, and imagining what might have filled them. “What’s your name?”
I flinch. The words echo, again and again, a question and a demand and a trap. I can’t answer her. Couldn’t if I wanted to—-I reach for the name, and in its place, I find a small, cold void, and a truer name within it.
“My name is Stranger,” I say, and repeat it. It feels like a shield. I am not who I was. She couldn’t survive this. I will.
“Stranger,” she echoes, and if she thinks it’s odd, she doesn’t voice an objection. “My name is Emily.”
I know that. But I nod, as if it’s new information. “What are you going to do?” I ask her.
She looks to the side. The light makes her hair glow like fire. “Everyone’s freaked out,” she says, as if it’s an answer to my question. “I mean. You understand, right? All of this—-it’s so awful. They don’t understand how he could do it.”
I stare at her, the cavity of my chest empty of any sensation. My heart must be beating because I’m still alive, but I don’t feel it, or the breath stretching my ribs. They don’t understand. But she does. There is no shock in her expression.
“Where is he?” I ask.
She looks startled. “You don’t know? Of course, how could you know?
He died. That’s why we’re here. We came home to clear out the house.
There was a key we couldn’t match to a lock, and Terry told us—-he said he’d been letting Dad use this place for storage.
Andrew thought there might be—-I don’t know. Something we needed to deal with.”
Her shoulders rise, a convulsive shrug. If she keeps biting that lip, she’s going to bloody it.
“How?” I ask, the word like the scrape of rocks.
“Heart attack. We think,” she says. “The coroner said probably a heart attack, but it had been so long . . .” She swallows.
So that was why he stopped coming. He was dead. Decaying up there while I rotted down here.
“The door didn’t open,” I say. Confusion sketches faint lines on her face.
“Sometimes it didn’t. No light for a while.
A few days. Hard to say. But it always came back.
The light.” Not the light. Him. He always came back.
He’s transforming. Becoming a person again, now that he’s dead, and there’s a danger in that because there are so many things that happened in the light that I can’t think about, can’t contain.
Mason Hill. A man, just a man, a man whose daughter looks so much like me, my echo--twin, but her skin is unbroken, her eyes bright and accustomed to the light.
“Did he hurt you?” she asks, as if there could be any answer but one.
I turn my face away. Dig my hands into my hair, nails against my scalp, and a sound comes out of me like a shriek.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Emily says hurriedly. She draws forward, hand outreached, but she doesn’t want to touch me. “Please stop, I’m sorry—-stop.” She hisses the last word, eyes wide as if in a panic, as footsteps descend rapidly.
“What the hell?” Andrew’s at the bottom of the stairs.
He strides forward and I think he’s coming for me, but he grabs his sister by the shoulders and drags her back.
He stands there, half shielding her, and looks over his shoulder at me.
I hunch against the ground. I must look like an animal, a filthy beast.
Melinda is here, too. Liam stands three steps up the staircase, spine curved like a question mark.
Melinda gathers Emily to her, back toward the far wall.
Andrew remains. He straightens. Clears his throat.
“Listen,” he says. “We’re not going to hurt you, but we need to figure out what to do.
The person who did this is dead, so. No need to cause any more damage, right?
Stay here for now. We’ll bring you something to eat. ”
“This is fucked up,” Liam mutters. No one responds.
“Don’t,” I say, but the sound is nothing but the whisper of insect wings.
Andrew turns. The others start up the stairs.
“Don’t,” I say again, and now the word is louder, but they keep going.
My whole body is shaking, a juddering that reaches into the deepest part of me, and there is a horrible howling in my ears.
They’re up the stairs, they’re leaving, and I cry out, and at last my body responds to my mind and I surge after them—-
Don’t leave don’t the light don’t I can’t don’t leave me in the dark—-
My foot catches the loose length of chain. I sprawl, barely catching myself on my hands, and for an instant, I think they’ve stopped, that they’ve turned back, but there’s only a pause, space enough for guilt to be felt and to be set aside. And then the door clangs shut.
I am in the dark once again.