Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
I sit in the parlor, where the afternoon sun streams onto Daisy’s diary placed atop the table.
I turn to a page at random, scouring the text, searching for what, I’m not quite sure.
Hints, I guess. Now that I’m certain what happened then is happening again, I need to find a way to stop it before it’s too late.
If that’s even possible.
It’s certainly too late for Julianne.
And Heather.
And Susie.
I feel grief bubble up in my chest just thinking how all three might be gone for good.
That can’t be possible, can it? That they just ceased to exist?
I’m still in denial about it, even after spending the morning circling the entire island, futilely looking for signs of their continued existence.
It was a long, exhausting hike that required me to pick my way along the shore, stepping over rocks, ducking trees, making the steep ascent along the cliff on the island’s northern end and then scrambling back down the other side.
Making it worse is that I did it all in my blue dress, which by now smells like an athletic sock that’s endured a marathon.
Why I put it on is beyond me at this point.
I assume it’s out of habit. Or maybe an unconscious wish for the situation to return to what was originally intended.
An acting exercise. Character building. Group bonding.
Instead, the group has been winnowed down to only three of us.
Violet and Ronan reacted just as you’d expect to the sight of Julianne’s dress in the tree.
Ronan stayed at a distance, his body coiled and ready to run, like he thought he’d also vanish at any second.
And even though Violet remained close, gripping my hand, I could tell she, too, was scared.
Her palm was clammy and cold as a corpse.
She trembled, too, the jittery motion transferring from her body into mine.
“When was the last time you talked to her?” Ronan said.
“In our room.”
Violet let go of my hand. “Why did she leave?”
“She swore Dean was outside. But I looked and there was no one there. Yet she insisted on it. Said she had to talk to him. Then she shoved me, fled the room, and ran outside. I chased after her, but it was too late. She was just gone.”
My voice cracked on that last word, because even though it was the only way to describe what had happened to Julianne, it also felt so inadequate. Four meager letters summing up an entire human being’s erasure.
During my loop around the island, I paused at the spot where Heather disappeared.
Last night, it was too dark to see if someone else had been there.
Today, in full daylight, I saw no signs of struggle.
No footprints in the muddy bank of the lake.
No obvious signs someone had moved through the nearby brush.
All I saw were the footprints left behind by me and Heather and some flattened undergrowth beside the downed tree that stretched from forest to water.
After that, I returned to the oak, staring at the clothes in its branches.
In the bright noon light, they were a riot of colors and textures.
Exotic blooms on a tropical tree. Just looking at them scared me in the same way that creepypasta posts or urban legend Reddit forums do.
Less than a minute had passed between Julianne’s disappearance in the mist and her dress ending up in the tree.
That wasn’t just weird or uncanny. It was brain-breakingly unfathomable.
Literally the only explanation I could think of—and it’s a doozy—is that when Azra takes someone, all that’s left of them are their clothes.
Like that War of the Worlds movie in which anyone zapped by the aliens is immediately disintegrated, leaving behind flyaway shirts and pants drifting on the breeze.
But why did the clothes go to the tree in the first place?
I could sort of, kind of understand why it was done in the ancient past, when people placed clothes on the island’s shore to appease the witches who allegedly lived here.
Maybe, I thought, that was what happened in 1926—and what was happening now.
An offering from Azra to appease a being even more powerful and malevolent than they were.
I slowly approached the oak, which had been at the center of these disappearances from the very beginning.
Not only was it where the clothes had been found, both now and a century ago, but it was literally in the middle of the island.
Most curious of all was how nothing strange happened on New Avalon until after lightning struck the tree during that first séance in 1926.
Daisy’s diary mentioned a dark, smoldering crevasse disturbing enough for Mrs. Minafer to claim that Hell had broken loose.
Today, though, there is no crevasse. Just a V-shaped split of trunk that is now scabbed over with bark. If a portal to Hell had once been there, it no longer exists.
I backed away from the tree and hurried here to the parlor, freaked out by both my thoughts and actions. That I’ve started looking for a literal Hellmouth shows just how crazy this place has made me.
Or maybe it’s the other way around and I’ve always been crazy. I saw my dead sister for an entire year, after all. If that’s not a sign of insanity, I don’t know what is.
Maybe Azra—or whatever unknown thing that’s been here for centuries—has been waiting for someone like me.
Just like it was waiting for Daisy. Biding its time on New Avalon until some sad, desperate, stricken soul arrived.
Then I did, and now here I am, sitting in a stinking dress with no plan other than to wait until something else happens.
I’ve long stopped expecting Loretta’s return. She’s gone, for reasons unknown, leaving us here until Pete arrives for his scheduled pickup on Saturday. That’s two days from now. Plenty of time for history to repeat itself as the rest of us vanish one by one.
Unless I can find some way to avoid it. Hence my frantic review of Daisy’s diary, which Ronan notices when he peeks into the parlor.
“There you are,” he says, visibly relieved. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“And I was looking for Julianne and Heather.”
Ronan doesn’t ask me if I found any sign of them. The answer is clearly no. He joins me at the table, scootching close to see what I’m reading.
“And this is?”
“Research,” I say, gripping the bound diary with a trembling hand. “I’m thinking that if I—”
The rest of the sentence refuses to emerge. I don’t know what I’m thinking, other than that three people are gone and we three who remain are going to end up the same way if I don’t do something. So my hand continues to shake, the diary it’s holding a jittery blur of words.
Ronan takes the diary, sets it down, grips my uncontrollable hand in both of his steady ones. “We’re going to get through this,” he says with such conviction that I start to believe him. It helps that his hands are warm and shockingly soft. Mine instantly calms, trembling no more.
He continues to keep hold of it, saying nothing. But his pulse races. I can feel the spiking beat in my palms. Something is happening, although I’m unsure what. The chance to find out, though, vanishes when Violet suddenly appears in the doorway.
“What’s going on here?” she says.
Ronan yanks his hands away from mine. Both drop into his lap as he says, “Looking over Daisy’s diary.”
“Why?” Violet says with more curiosity than suspicion. She joins us at the table, eyeing the diary, its pages wrinkled and dog-eared.
“Trying to make a plan,” I say, echoing the advice she gave me our first night here. “Daisy, Mrs. Semple, the others? They didn’t have one. And they vanished because of it. But we can learn from their mistakes. I mean, we all agree that this is Azra’s doing, right?”
“Yes?” Violet says, her voice thick with uncertainty.
“And that Azra isn’t a ghost but—”
“A demon.”
Violet lets out a disbelieving laugh that, while on the surface seems inappropriate, completely sums up the insanity of the situation. On one hand, I feel silly—just absolutely bananapants insane—for thinking all of this could be real. But on the other hand, it’s still happening.
“The answer might be somewhere in here,” I say, gesturing to the diary.
“Because Daisy wrote about it, we can assume what’s coming next, especially since everything that’s happening now occurred in the past, in roughly the same order.
Susie and Katrina Fiske first, then Heather and Jonquil Collins, and Julianne and Phoebe Minafer.
Following that pattern, the next person would be—”
“We don’t know,” Ronan says. “When Daisy’s diary ends, both she and Mrs. Semple are still alive. That might have changed on one of those missing pages, but we’ll never know.”
“But it’s me in the screenplay,” Violet says. “If that means anything.”
“The fact that we don’t know makes it even more important to have a plan,” I say.
Violet picks up a diary page, scans it, sets it back down. “You talked about Azra following a pattern. Perhaps that’s the key. Figure out the pattern, find a way to break it, and potentially end this whole thing.”
It’s a good idea—in theory. But without those last diary pages, we’re in essence flying blind.
“Has the diary so far provided any clues on how to do that?” Ronan says.
“Not yet.” I sigh, looking to the stuffed peacock on the wall.
The way its dust-covered plumage droops from the fake branch reminds me of the clothes currently in the oak.
It doesn’t help that bits of those tail feathers match what we’re wearing.
The blue of my dress. Violet’s lavender.
Even Ronan’s omnipresent neckerchief, the one item of clothing I can’t picture hanging from the tree.
“Ronan,” I say.
The corner of his mouth twitches. “What?”
“You might be the break in the pattern we’re looking for. There were no men on the island when Daisy was here.”
Violet, catching on, adds, “And you’re the only person who hasn’t seen or felt the presence of someone you once knew.”
“Yeah, about that.” Ronan clears his throat, tugs his neckerchief, and turns away.
“I might not have been entirely honest when I said I haven’t experienced anything weird this week.
I think I might have sensed someone. The first night here, I woke up in the middle of the night and smelled perfume. Her perfume.”
He doesn’t specify who he’s talking about. He doesn’t need to.
“Elise,” I say.
Ronan responds with the smallest of nods. “For a second, it felt like she was right there, lying next to me. Her scent, it was everywhere. And it happened the night after that. And last night as well.”
Violet leans forward, propped up by her elbows. “And you believe it was her?”
“I thought it was,” Ronan says. “That she had somehow found her way here.”
Which I assume means he wronged Elise in some way right before she died. Just like Violet and Julianne did with the people they sensed on the island. And just like I did with Molly.
“Why didn’t you tell us last night?” I say.
“I don’t know. I guess I was embarrassed. It felt too personal.”
“More personal than me talking about seeing my dead sister?”
“I’m sorry about that,” Ronan says. “Had I known what you said during your audition was real, I never would have let you come here. This place. It’s like fucking quicksand, and all of us are slowly sinking under, dragged down by our pasts.”
And we’re the lucky ones, I realize. Unlike Julianne, Heather, and Susie, we have yet to be fully submerged. But for how long?
Settled back in her chair, Violet fingers the locket hanging from her neck, inadvertently mirroring Ronan’s tic. “Maybe our pasts are the way out of this,” she says. “Think about it. Azra might be using the ghosts of people we’ve known and loved and wronged to get to us, right?”
“Well, pretending to be them,” I add, which—again—sounds absolutely batshit insane.
“That will no longer be possible if we make peace with those same people.”
I stare at her, baffled. “Make peace?”
“Yes. With my father and your sister. If we can find closure with them, Azra won’t have any ammunition to use against us. The pattern will be broken.”
It makes a certain amount of sense. Well, as much as anything about this situation can make sense. Yet it prompts two questions, the first spoken by Ronan.
“Where do I fit into all of this? Like Marin said, I’m literally the odd man out here.”
“Maybe not as odd as you think,” Violet says. “If you’re being haunted like the rest of us, there’s no reason to think you’ll be spared. It’s just a question of when. For all we know, you could be next.”
Ronan gulps, leaving me to ask the second question. “Let’s say you’re right and that this will work. How do we get closure with people who are already dead?”
“That’s easy.” Violet opens her arms, sweeping them over the table. “We hold another séance.”