Rules for Vanishing

by Kate Alice Marshall

  Whatever was chasing me is gone now, or I hope it is. I stretch my fingers out, ball them into fists, stretch them again, trying to get feeling back into my extremities. The hall is narrow and featureless. Only one way to go.

  I haven’t gone far when I reach an intersection, other hallways leading left and right. An arrow is carved in the wall in a dozen frantic lines, pointing left. They look like old lines carved on a tree trunk, swelling shut. As if the house is healing over them.

  Do I trust it?

  I touch my fingers to the gouges. They don’t belong. Made by someone who didn’t belong. I turn left.

  I pass a door to my right and don’t stop. The hallway hooks, hooks again. More doors. No windows, no source of light, but I can see through the gloom—not well, but a bit. The hallway branches again. Three directions this time, and something scratched in the floor itself, but the head of the arrow is gone. Only a few narrow, broken lines remain, and those are scabbing over. Left or right? I’ll have to guess.

  I turn right. Down another hall, just like the rest. Three doors. A turn. And then—

  An intersection up ahead, but that’s not what stops me. Light, gold-yellow, creeps along the floor and along the walls. The source of it is moving toward the intersection from the left-hand hall. And with it, footsteps and a soft, gentle chiming. I take a tentative step forward, then halt.

  Watch for her light. Warning? Or instruction?

  There has been nothing kind in this place.

  The light is drawing closer. I turn, ready to hurry back the way I came. I just stepped around the corner, and yet behind me the hall stretches straight and narrow until it vanishes into the dark. No corner to duck behind. Nowhere to run, except the doors to either side of me.

  I hesitate. The light spills farther toward me, oozing across the floor. Where it touches the walls, gouges appear, deep rents in the plaster and something meaty and soft behind it, pale as milk.

  I can’t stay. I reach for the nearest door, my hand closing around the handle—

  And it’s already open, and opening wider.

  She stares at me, mouth agape. Becca. Hair tumble-wild around her face, skin streaked with dust, pupils blown wide. And then her eyes dart past me, and she hisses between her teeth.

  “Get in!”

  She yanks me through the door, shuts it fast—halting just shy of the frame, so it makes no noise. She leaves it open a slit and peers into the crack. My heart hammering, I look past her as the light swings around the corner and into view.

  It’s a woman, carrying a candle in an old-fashioned holder, the kind with a loop on one side. She wears a mushroom-colored dress, Victorian, high-collared and formal, and her hair is pinned up on her head.

  She has no face. The shapes of a face are hinted at, but no eyes, no mouth, no nostrils. Only a pattern like bark. Like the striations in the sky. She walks on slippered feet, steady and deliberate, the flame never flickering. With every step, something chimes softly. She draws close. Draws even with our door.

  Becca reaches back and grabs my hand, squeezing tight. Quiet, the touch seems to say, but I can’t even breathe; I couldn’t make a sound if I wanted to.

  Across the hall, behind the other door, something makes a muffled flapping. The woman pauses. Becca’s grip tightens. The woman half turns, away from us.

  Her back is hollow. No spine, no flesh, no organs. Only a smooth cavity from her shoulder blades to her hips, and five tiny, silver bells hanging from silvery thread, chiming softly as she moves.

  She opens the door across the hall. The light spills in, but all I can make out is a frantic flutter of movement. A quick thump-thump-thump. She strides in with sudden purpose, and I lose sight of her. Another sound, a keening, begins but cuts off quickly, and then she returns with brisk steps. She shuts the door and returns to her position in the center of the hall, bells ringing clink-clink-clink.

  She rolls her neck from side to side, smooths her skirts with one hand, and resumes her walk. One deliberate step after another. The light draws past, draws away. The chiming of bells fades.

  Becca turns to me. I expect—joy, perhaps. Relief. Anything of what I’m feeling, this overwhelming crash of emotion that steals every word from me.

  But her face is crumpled. She puts a hand to my cheek, shaking her head. “Oh, Sara,” she says. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  INTERVIEW

  MELANIE WHITTAKER

  May 9, 2017

  Mel sits idly drumming her fingers on the table when Abigail Ryder returns. Abby gives a tight smile, a poor attempt at seeming personable, before taking her seat opposite once more.

  MEL: You keep leaving like that, I’m going to think you don’t like me. Which, by the way, sorry about punching you.

  ABBY: It’s really not the worst reaction I’ve seen to that kind of thing.

  MEL: I still can’t believe we just forgot about Nick.

  ABBY: You remember now, though?

  MEL: Pieces. He was my best friend, but I only know that because you told me. And people have been asking me where he went, but I didn’t even remember that until just now.

  ABBY: You might never fully remember.

  MEL: Great.

  She rubs her eyes; they’re puffy, as if she’s been crying. She clears her throat, seeming uncomfortable with this display of emotion, and gives Abby a forced smile.

  MEL: So. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen, doing this?

  Abby considers. Her answer, when it comes, has the cadence of a lie.

  ABBY: I have to be honest, I think you’ve seen much stranger things than I have. Ask Ashford, maybe, but he tends to share exactly zero things of substance from his past. Won’t even let me look at most of his files. Most of what I’ve done is standard spook stuff—ghosts. Hauntings.

  MEL: But you do believe in all of this.

  ABBY: Yeah, you don’t have to worry about either of us pulling the skeptic card on you. I mean, skeptical about details, maybe. But we both know what’s out there.

  MEL: Then you’re not just here because . . .

  ABBY: Because what?

  Mel hesitates.

  MEL: It’s just. I heard you talking to Dr. Ashford, before. You said you wanted to ask us about Miranda, and he told you to wait. And I thought you must have—it seemed like you knew her.

  ABBY: I did.

  MEL: I’m sorry.

  ABBY: You don’t need to be.

  MEL: We lost her.

  ABBY: You really didn’t.

  MEL: If we’d been paying more attention, one of us could have grabbed her hand, and—

  ABBY: Melanie, Miranda died months ago.

  MEL: What?

  Abby slides a file across the table to Mel, who opens it hesitantly. The angle of the camera offers no glimpse of its contents.

  ABBY: Autopsy report. Look at the date. And the location.

  MEL: It says Jane Doe.

  ABBY: There’s a photo, but I don’t recommend—

  Mel turns the page and lets out a small cry, pressing a hand to her mouth.

  MEL: Oh my God. What—what happened to her?

  ABBY: It’s not . . . that isn’t relevant right now. But it’s not your fault. It happened long before you met her.

  MEL: But she was there. She was with us.

  ABBY: I know. And I don’t think she left you when the dark came. There’s a voice in the video, right before the phones shut off. I’ve listened to it a few times. It’s her, Mel.

  MEL: I . . . I wasn’t sure. I thought so, but then I decided it wasn’t possible.

  ABBY: What happened?

  MEL: She said quiet. And we all went quiet. And we heard this sound. It was like—a sort of singing. Humming. And a scuttling. And then someone whispered this way, and the door next to m
e opened. I went through. I don’t know if I trusted the voice or if I was just more afraid of whatever was making that sound, but the others followed.

  Abby nods.

  MEL: You really think it was Miranda?

  ABBY: Sara never told you?

  MEL: Wait. Sara knew? Why wouldn’t she—

  Her brow furrows.

  ABBY: That is a big part of what we’re trying to piece together.

  VIDEO EVIDENCE

  Retrieved from the cell phone of Melanie Whittaker

  Recorded April 19, 2017, 12:52 a.m.

  Mel, Trina, Jeremy, Kyle, and Anthony move swiftly down the hall, their footsteps echoing. The scuttling and the singing follow them. The hallways are a tangle; they make little sense. They approach a T-intersection.

  TRINA: It’s getting closer.

  MEL: Then hurry!

  Her voice is too loud in the quiet hall. The humming sound swells, and the camera spins around as Mel whirls to face the thing that’s following them.

  It could almost be called a spider. Thick black legs spike around the corner, spanning the hallway, with their hooked ends gouging holes in the wall to either side. It glistens, even in the shadows. Then comes the head: almost human, but eyeless, desiccated flesh pulled tight over the contours of a skull. Its lips pull back from black, jagged teeth, and a long, papery tongue, pointed at the end, slithers between them, tasting the air.

  Its shoulders emerge next—withered skin, protruding bones. No arms, only nubs, puckered flesh at their ends. A thin chest and then a rib cage, exposed, blackened. But more disturbing than that, something is inside the ribs. Barely visible as more than the faintest silhouette—and fingers, threading through the ribs, like hands about to part curtains and peer through. It is from behind the ribs that the piping, singing sound comes.

  Where the humanoid torso’s legs should be, it connects clumsily to an arachnid’s body. It approaches steadily as its tongue lashes the air.

  GRACE: Hey. This way.*

  The voice is a whisper. Mel sucks in a startled breath as a white woman peers out from one of the sides of the hallway intersection ahead, beckoning. She wears a T-shirt with a cartoon fox and a grungy gray sweatshirt. Her hair is buzzed short at the temples and longer on top, sections of it dyed blue. Midthirties, perhaps, though weariness ages her.

  GRACE: Come here. And whatever you do, don’t run.

  The teens glance at each other, and then at the creature. It’s nearly on them. They dart down the spur of hallway the woman occupies, and she waves them into stillness and silence as the spider advances.

  It moves on, past them. It doesn’t seem to realize that they’re there, and soon it vanishes down the hall in the distance.

  TRINA: What was that?

  GRACE: Keep your voice down. Something’s always listening, and everything’s always hungry. There’s worse things than the spider in here.

  MEL: Uh, sorry—who are you?

  GRACE: I’m Grace. Winters. And don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of here.

  18

  “YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE come,” Becca says, and my throat feels closed up. “Are you—you’re alone? But you couldn’t have gotten this far without—”

  “Shut up,” I say, desperate with emotions too immense to have names, and pull her close. She’s stiff against me for the first moment. In the second, one of her hands creeps up my back with the fluttering step of a cautious insect, and then flattens between my shoulder blades, a pressure that is as much disbelief as love. Then she wrenches away.

  “You can’t have come this far alone,” she says, gaze dropping from mine and shifting toward the dark corner of the room like she can’t bear to meet my eye. She stands like she’s resisting the urge to scrape the sensation of my touch from her skin. I want to ask her what happened to her, but I don’t need to know to understand.

  A year in this place? I must be stranger than any monster.

  “The others are with me,” I say, and she flashes me a look of relief at the chance to retreat into practicality and fact. Feeling is too dangerous. “Anthony and Trina and Mel. Kyle and Jeremy Polk, too, and Vanessa Han was with us, but—”

  She holds up a hand. “Wait. They’re all here? In the house?”

  “I don’t know. They were, and then I was alone,” I say. I’m babbling. Still not sure I believe what I see—my sister, standing right in front of me.

  “It does that,” Becca says. “They’re probably in the halls somewhere by now, though.” She cocks her head, listening. “We have to move. It’s not good to stay in one place too long. Come on.”

  She takes my hand again and leads me out into the hall. She’s not wearing shoes, I realize. Her bare feet are filthy, but they make hardly any sound on the floorboards as she hurries forward. I’m not so graceful. She takes a practiced series of turns, then ducks inside another room—an office, maybe, with a desk piled with books and old papers sitting in the middle of the room, a wide book like a ledger open and covered in dust at the middle. The pages are covered in spidery writing, familiar—in the town in the woods on the road are the halls that breathe, I make out, and then Becca shuts the door almost all the way and turns back to me.

  “Tell me again who you brought with you,” she says. “How many have you lost?”

  “Two,” I tell her. “A girl you don’t know and Vanessa.” I name the others quickly, and she shuts her eyes, lips moving as if she’s speaking to herself. When they open again, they’re shiny with tears.

  “You shouldn’t have come. None of you should have come,” she says.

  “We came to find you.”

  “And it’s no good,” she says. “Two by two. You can only get out two by two, and there’s an even number of you.”

  “What?”

  “The exit to this place. It’s darkness,” Becca says. “The kind you need a partner to get through. Like the Liar’s Gate—the first one?”

  “I know its name. It was in the notebook. What—what happened to Zach?” I ask.

  “Zach’s dead,” she says flatly. “I’ve been by myself for . . . I don’t know how long.”

  “You’ve been gone a year,” I say. And however long we’ve been on the road now. A day? I can’t be sure.

  “A year?” she asks. Laughs, half-wild. “So you’re older than me now.” I make a confused sound, and she waves a hand. “You don’t change in this place. No getting hungry. No sleep. You get tired, but I don’t think you age. So you’re older than me. Big sister.” She smiles, crooked. I keep wanting to touch her, reassure myself that she’s real.

  “We thought you were dead,” I say. “We looked for you. The police—they thought you ran away with Zachary, and—”

  “I didn’t mean to leave. I thought—I thought we could get through, and find her, and it would be all right. She promised it would be all right.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Lucy,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “She called us here, to save her. She’s trapped. Can’t you hear her?”

  I stare at her. Lick my lips, the answer inexplicably impossible to get out. “No,” I say at last. “I don’t hear her.”

  I cannot tell if I am lying.

  * * *

  —

  Becca tells me we have to keep moving. She leads me through halls, through rooms, somehow seeming to keep track of the endless turns. It’s all the road, she assures me, every plank in this house. There’s no danger of wandering off.

  I tell her everything that’s happened so far. The darkness and the town, Vanessa and Trina.

  “Echoes,” she tells me. “When they replace you, they’re called echoes. Zach found this book by someone who said he’d been on the road. He talked about them. It helped, the book. Told us what to expect. But the monsters aren’t the only thing you
have to be afraid of here.”

  “What happened to you?” I ask.

  She gives me a hollow look. “I try not to think about it much,” she says. “I’d been having these dreams. Dreams about the road. About Lucy Gallows. About the beast. They were just nightmares, but Zach went looking online. He helped me put it all together. He’s the one that found out about Ys.”

  “Ys?” I echo, pinging against a scrap of memory. The words in the town.

  “It’s a city. Or was. It’s where the road goes—used to go. It was destroyed a long time ago by a woman named Dahut. She was a princess, or something. There was a gate in the city that held back the sea, and she left it open, to let her lover sneak in to see her. But she forgot to close it, and the tide came in and drowned the whole city. That’s the story, anyway. And it’s all that death that made the road. If you can get all the way to Ys, you can escape it. But most people get trapped. Lucy did. She’s been stuck on the road for all these years, but she’s found a way to—she sort of whispers. Only to certain people. Sensitive people. And I guess I’m one of them.”

  Every so often she stops, listening. Sometimes she pulls us in a new direction, but I can never hear what she does.

  “I’ve got your notebook,” I say after a while of silence, because I need to hear her speak again. “It’s hard to understand, but it helped us, too.”

  “My notebook?” she says, face screwing up in confusion. “What notebook?”

  “I—this one,” I say, unzipping my bag. I pull out the journal and she snatches it from me, paging through. Something like fear sketches across her face.

  “How did you get this?” she demands.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “It was in your room. Under your bed.”

  “No,” she says. “I brought it with me. I had it here. I lost it—I don’t know. A long time ago now. But here in the house. Most of those notes I took on the road.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I say. Anything can happen on the road. But back home? There’s a threshold between this world and the one we came from, and the inexplicable isn’t supposed to cross it. Until this moment, the road has felt contained. A separate world that couldn’t encroach on ours; we could only enter the road’s world. This is different.