Chapter 47
Despite herself, she drifted off during episode three of a podcast about the LeBaron cult and the women who escaped it, and fell into a strange liminal space of jumbled dreams, as if pieces of different movies had been madly cut and spliced together.
As she tossed and turned, she was in the basement, trying to get up the stairs to get out, her own bloody hand on the wall. Grandma staring at her, eyes wide as she repeated over and over, “They say a girl died here.”
Finding Grandma in the hallway at night by the carpet, but this time there was blood staining it, Grandma muttering, “Too late, too late,” and when she saw Anna looking at her, she pressed her hands to her ears and screamed so loud that she startled Anna back into the waking world, where she lay for a moment, disoriented in the night, until her breathing calmed and trembling subsided, leaving her with a throbbing headache and a need to pee.
She forced herself up and out into the darkness of the house, disturbing its rest. There was no sound from downstairs, and, looking over the banister, she saw the hallway was empty. Good. She didn’t have the energy for any of Grandma’s weirdness.
On her way back from the bathroom, she saw Caroline’s door was open a crack, and she looked inside, her little sister fast asleep, the covers kicked off, her beautiful hair fanned out on her pillow.
She thought about how Mom had said she’d been on FaceTime with Holly, flushed and proud.
Anna would put money on Holly and her friend perhaps not having started their periods yet.
Caroline had crossed a threshold they hadn’t reached.
Magical. Mystical. Terrifying and seductive.
They would be desperate for it right up until the moment it arrived.
She closed the door, leaving Caroline to her own, hopefully more pleasant, dreams.
It was only four thirty, but outside, the endless land was breaking the surface of night, becoming visible again.
They were safe. She crawled under her sheets as exhaustion and her headache gripped her, and fell into a deep sleep, one that was punctured only with occasional flashes of things her brain wouldn’t allow her to remember but that she’d seen.
Different masks. Men doing things to her body that she knew only from the outside when they shared the photos and videos.
Things that trapped her. She tossed and turned, murmuring into the dawn, the names almost surfacing, until all the dead girls pushed them back down, demanding that empty space, claiming it as their own.