Chapter 44 Before
Before
If I knock at the wall tonight, there will be no response. I’ve lost Liam. I still can’t say how much of that was me and how much was inevitable. Either way, he’s failed me. He’ll leave, and it will be the first domino. The rest will tumble one by one.
Andrew brings me my meal that night. Not good, but I knew that already. He looks me in the eye. I find no mercy there.
Melinda doesn’t come at all. Her decision won’t matter. Andrew’s made his. He’ll do it behind her back if he has to.
My ghosts keep me company. They faded for a time, like they couldn’t figure out how to exist in this new place, but they’ve returned. They’ve rotted since I saw them last, holes in them like a moth--eaten sweater. Sometimes I think I see things moving in the gaps.
I’m glad they’re here. I’ll still be among them, one of them, in the end. I only wish I’d gotten the chance to leave my real name alongside theirs, for the next girl to find.
There won’t be a next girl, she reminds me.
“There’s always a next girl,” I whisper. Doesn’t matter that he’s dead. There’s always a hole in the ground waiting to swallow one of us up, and someone eager to put us there.
A tentative hand knocks on the door. As always, my visitor doesn’t wait for a response before opening it. Emily stands there, a pile of laundry balanced in one arm. I sit cross--legged on the bed, holding a pillow against my torso. We stare at each other a moment.
“I got you some new clean clothes,” she says. She steps in and shuts the door behind her. She goes to the dresser, putting her back to me. “Liam shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s not his fault,” I say, not sure why I’m defending him. Of course he shouldn’t have. I seduced him, but it shouldn’t have been possible. Maybe it wouldn’t have been, if it weren’t for the drugs, the alcohol.
“We all make mistakes,” she says, busying herself with putting clothes in the drawers. I don’t bother to tell her that I won’t need that many. I won’t have time to need them. “The important thing is how we deal with them.”
“What mistakes have you made?” I ask.
She looks back at me at last. Her eyes are doe--like.
She isn’t that much younger than me, but she seems childlike in so many ways.
She moves like she’s making herself small.
“Melinda has to go back into the city tomorrow,” she says, rather than answering me.
“She’s going to drive Liam to the airport, and then she’s going to be gone all day. ”
My throat constricts. That’s when he’ll do it. He’ll promise Melinda he’s not going to do anything hasty, and then . . .
Or, hell. Maybe she knows. Maybe she just wants to be able to pretend she had no idea what he would do the minute her back was turned. And Emily? I don’t believe for a moment that she’s any protection against her brother.
“Do you know the story of Jenny Red--Hands?” Emily asks. I jolt.
“Yes,” I say, throat dry, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.
“They say she lived in the woods with her family, until something terrible happened. No one believed her. No one protected her. So she made herself into a monster. She did what she had to do,” Emily says, not looking at me.
“They say she’s still out there. That if a girl brings her an offering, she’ll come, and she’ll have her knife with her.
And sometimes, she’ll hurt the people who deserve to be hurt.
And sometimes, she’ll make that girl disappear.
So you don’t go into the woods and call her name unless either version would be better than what you have now. I used to save my teeth.”
She looks back at me, the abrupt shift startling me.
“I kept them in a box. Dad wanted me to leave them for the tooth fairy, but I wouldn’t. When I heard the story, I finally knew why. Because that’s her price. A string of teeth. But she didn’t come.” Her voice is matter--of--fact and distant, and I find myself sitting very still.
She moves a sweater from the top of the stack of laundry. Underneath, hidden by its bulk until now, are a pair of running shoes. She casually tucks the sweater into the top drawer, moves the shoes, and stows the remaining pairs of pants.
“Have a good night,” she says simply, and steps out of the room. The door shuts behind her. I wait, holding my breath, ears straining.
The key scrapes into the lock. But it doesn’t turn. She withdraws it, and then her footsteps move at a quick clip down the hall.
She’s giving me a chance. A slim chance, but I have to take it.
I steal across the floor. The shoes are almost a perfect fit—-a half size too small, but I’ll take pinched toes gladly. I lace them up tight and tuck the ends in. Can’t afford to trip.
I look outside. The bluish tint of near night casts the trees in somber shades.
There will be enough light to see by, enough shadow to conceal me.
If only I can get out undetected. Cut through the woods, and then across to the road.
I’ve heard the sound of trucks; I know which direction to head. If only I can get past the others.
Down the hall in the living room, the sound of the TV starts up, the thumping bass of an action movie.
I won’t get a better chance than this.
I creep to the door. Half of me expects that I misheard and the door will still be locked, but the knob turns under my hand.
Every time one of them opens it, it creaks halfway, so I slot my body through the narrowest gap I can.
The hall is hidden from the living room.
To the left, I can reach the garage—-and freedom.
I start toward it. And stop. Liam’s door is open.
The light is off, but the room is not empty—-he’s sitting on the bed, head in his hands, in the dark.
As I hesitate there—-for a second or two, no more—-he looks up.
His eyes reflect the light from the hall, but behind that glint I can’t read anything at all.
Tentatively, I put a finger to my lips. And then I walk swiftly away. I have no choice but to hope.
The garage door is stiff but opens with hardly a sound. I have to restrain myself from sprinting. I can’t afford a single squeak of my shoes giving me away.
I skirt the covered car, entertaining images of reversing it out of the garage in a squeal of tires and tearing down the road. Then the garage door is open—-still no shout from behind me, no thundering feet—-and I’m outside.
Outside, with a mist of rain against my skin and the cloud--draped sky dark velvet above me. I’m not free yet, but I can taste it.
My eyes aren’t used to the dark anymore.
I wade out into it, away from the persistent glow of the house lights.
Not far now. Dead girls school like minnows around me, scale--flash shimmers, their movements quick and anxious.
I pick up my pace. Branches crackle underfoot, eager to give me away, but muffled gunfire and percussion from the movie drown out their efforts.
The gossamer girls are all around me. I stumble.
Nine days since I came to the house. Nine days of food and rest and warmth and wearing a track back and forth.
I have the strength for this. I have swift feet and enough fear to keep me moving, and I will be free, I will run, I will find the road and a pair of headlights, and I will be found, I will live—-
There is a girl in front of me. Copper hair and haunted eyes. My vision is so clotted with ghosts that for an instant I miss that this is no gossamer girl, that her flesh is solid and she’s not one of us—-
She was never one of us—-
“I’m sorry,” Emily says.
“Emily?” I manage, my voice small.
She looks at me with eyes so empty of life I understand why I thought she belonged to the gossamer girls. “You’re already dead. This is better,” she says.
“What are you doing?” I ask, backing away half a step.
“She didn’t come. Jenny never came to take me away, but it was okay. He found a way to protect me,” Emily says, drawing closer. The gossamer girls are flickers of light in my vision, harrying her. “You were bad girls. It’s okay for bad girls to die if it means everyone else is safe.”
I stare at her in dawning horror. “I’m no threat to you,” I say.
“Yes, you are. I saw what you made my brother do,” she says. “I’ll tell them I tried to stop you and you attacked me. They’ll see I had to do it. Then none of them have to feel bad.”
She steps forward again, and I see the shape in her hand only as she brings it around in a brutal arc: a hammer.
The impact against my skull is an explosion of pain, a death of light. I feel myself falling, but I don’t feel myself hit the ground. I am insubstantial; I am nothing; I am gossamer at last, and at last, in this darkness, I am free.