Harrow Lake

by Kat Ellis

  I move as though weightless, propelled by a breeze that isn’t there. Behind the music is a tap-tap-tapping that catches my footsteps. It’s familiar. Hypnotic. I walk toward it.

  My mother was right. Mister Jitters is real, and I need to prove it.

  The entrance to the underground gondola ride is still boarded over, but the gap where Carter and I slid through last time is open. That’s where the sound is coming from, that thrumming that makes my ears itch inside. There’s no light in there, but a shape crosses the gap—a movement in the shadows. Jerky, unnatural. Bone-white against the darkness.

  He’s here.

  I back up silently toward the entrance gates. I hear his chattering beneath the notes of the music, getting louder even as I put more distance between us.

  Some sense alerts me to the fence at my back. I’m only one step from the crisscrossing wires that hum with current, the gates several yards away now. How did I veer so far in the wrong direction that I almost fried myself? And how is it that the gates are now closed? I didn’t do that.

  I hurry toward them, but when I tug at the gates they don’t move. They aren’t chained, I just can’t get them to budge. It’s like something invisible is holding them in place.

  Shit.

  Why did I think coming here was a good idea? What’s the point in proving a monster exists if I don’t make it out of here alive?

  Stupid, Lola!

  At the far end of the fairground, there’s that stutter of movement again—the flash of a bone-white face. Then a figure emerges from behind the shed and disappears behind the ring-toss booth. He’s moved away from the gondola ride. He’s coming closer.

  I can’t get out over the gate or the electrified fence. I can’t climb the sheer rock face around the entrance to the gondola ride. The only way I know to get out is through the caves, and up the steep sides of the sinkhole where I saw the church.

  The lot is all lit up. If I stay here, he’ll find me. By the time everyone comes back to town, I’ll have disappeared like the others. Like I was never even here.

  The tunnels. I need to get inside the tunnels.

  I hurry over to the loose shutter of the gondola ride and slip inside, the shutter swinging closed behind me, sealing me in darkness. The noise outside is still there, only muffled through the wooden boards.

  I fumble for the pendant I took from the fairground gate. Weak light illuminates the space I’m standing in.

  Lorelei is gone.

  The words whisper to me from the walls, written by girls who feared the monster I came looking for. I press my lips together. The sound outside hasn’t changed, but I have the sense that he’s nearer now. Can he hear me? I don’t know, but I don’t want to risk it. I need to hurry.

  Whatever Mister Jitters is, and whatever he wants, he’s out there right now, waiting for me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I follow the narrow ledge lining the channel of water. It’s easier in my sneakers, but the sense that someone is following me, creeping up behind me, makes the damp rocks a hundred times more slippery under my soles.

  My footsteps mingle with the patter of droplets falling onto the black water. I can almost feel stiff fingers reaching out for me.

  I don’t remember the church being this far when I came with Carter, but everything stretches in the dark—not just shadows. I walk right into solid rock, almost dropping my flashlight. Ahead is a dead end. I need to go back, retrace my steps. Then someone calls my name through the tunnel.

  I freeze. Is that Mary Ann? Was she the one I saw out there in the fairground? No. The figure I saw was too tall, too inhuman. But she might have followed me in here.

  What does she want?

  “Lola . . .” It has a singsong quality that makes my hair stand on end. “Lo-laaaaa . . .”

  Is she here to help me, or lure me in? Am I running toward a monster?

  Twice I slip and nearly break my ankle before I stumble into a shallow part of the stream running through the caves. It fills my sneakers with icy water and sloshes up my legs. I lose my footing, landing hard on the stone path. I try not to sob. Fail. Waves of noise ebb against my skull, but the voice is now silent.

  “Mary Ann?” I cry out. “Mary Ann, where are you? What do you want?”

  There’s no answer. I wait, hearing only wet sounds, rhythmic and mocking. Did I just imagine it?

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  A sound shudders through the cavern, cracking into shards and reverberating off the walls around me. Snap-snap-snap-snap-SNAP!

  Is that Mary Ann? Mister Jitters? Or was Carter right—is the ground shifting above my head?

  The icy chill of the cave wall bleeds through the back of my sweater.

  Come on, Lola. Just find the church so you can get out of this place. Not Nolan’s voice now, and not Mary Ann’s—my own.

  I head back the way I came, keeping an eye on the ground where the light of the pendant casts a dim pool around my feet. I leave wet trails that fade into the blackness behind me.

  “Damn it,” I mutter, stopping again. It’s the same wall of rock facing me—the same dead end. I can’t have passed it again, can I? The way into the sinkhole must be farther than I thought. It’s just hard to think straight with all that noise.

  The cold bites my soaked feet, draining them of feeling a little more with each step. I’ve only gone a little farther when I slip on a sharp stone. Pain shoots up my calf. I curse, crouching to rub the muscle. Then something brushes against my hair.

  My head jerks up, but there’s nobody there. I peer in all directions. Nothing.

  “Mary Ann?” I whisper. “Are you there?”

  I know there won’t be an answer.

  I’m alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I must walk for hours, slipping and sliding from one chamber to another, with that chatter-chatter-chatter wrapped around me like a blanket, the noise like Lorelei’s jitterbugs. Did she think that, too? Was that really why she made them? To remind her of this dark place, to warn her about monsters creeping into her room at night?

  The light from the pendant is growing dimmer. I’ve been trying not to notice it, but it barely illuminates the path anymore. Soon I’ll be swallowed by the dark. Will anyone come looking for me?

  I start to sing softly, keeping myself company as my words bounce back at me:

  “He got trapped underground for a really long while,

  Then he fed on the dead and got a brand-new smile . . .”

  I laugh, high and sharp. If this were an old black-and-white movie, someone would slap me now.

  My ankle throbs. I have to get out of here. But the tunnels all look the same, and I’ve turned around and around so many times I don’t know which way I came in. Was the stream running into the cave, or out of it? It doesn’t matter: I can’t tell which way the water’s flowing anyway.

  I crouch down, rubbing my ankle while I try to stem the dread. What would Nolan tell me to do? I try to listen for him. But all I hear now is the echoing chatter. Just chatter.

  “Stop it,” I say. I pretend my voice is Nolan’s. “There are at least two ways out of these caves—through the church, and back out the way you came in.”

  I stand; straighten my spine so the vertebrae crack. The sound joins the chatter. I walk on. It’s all I can do. I keep my hand on the wall and trace the rough surface with my fingers so I won’t miss an opening. I’ve been doing this for a few minutes when the pendant at my throat flickers, then dies.

  “Don’t panic,” I say to the darkness. My voice is calm. Calm. I am calm. “Keep your hand on the wall. You’ll find the way out as long as you don’t panic.”

  “Panic panic panic panic panic . . .”

  The word reverberates around me. Mister Jitters is here, mocking me. He’s gettin
g closer. Too close.

  “I’ll never leave you like she did,” Mary Ann whispers, but then her voice changes, becomes a rattle of teeth next to my ear. “Like they all do.”

  I sense her shifting in the dark, stretching, becoming monstrous. Becoming Mister Jitters.

  I arch like a scorpion as his brittle finger traces my spine, leaving a wet trail behind. Then I run.

  I make it five steps before my legs are knocked out from under me, and I fall headlong into nothingness.

  I expect to hit water or wet stone, but when I land it’s on a smooth surface, and it rocks under the impact. My teeth clash with the inside of my cheek, and my wrist burns where I land on it hard. Is it broken? I’ve never broken a bone before, and I don’t know how to tell, but this hurts so, so much. My mouth fills with the taste of blood. I swallow it down, along with the whimper trying to fight its way out of me.

  Good girl. You didn’t make a sound.

  I’m in a boat. Narrow, wooden, and long enough that I can lie flat in the base of it. I remember the one scene in Nightjar where Little Bird runs along the path and dives into a gondola just as it enters the caves on an underground stream. This was her gondola—a prop from the set. It saved her from the villagers hunting her with their pitchforks and their empty bellies, at least for a time. Maybe it will save me now.

  I roll onto my side, bumping up against something that isn’t the side of the gondola, and feel around the fabric covering it. Something rigid, cold.

  My hand shakes as I run my fingers over the hard bumps.

  Oh god.

  I bite back a sob. There’s the swell of a rib cage, the ball of a shoulder joint. Then hair brushes against my knuckles.

  “No, no, no, no, no . . .”

  I want to scramble out of the boat and run screaming into the dark, but I force my fingers to wrap around the straw-like hair, trace a jawbone, follow the smooth line up to the temple where my fingers meet a jagged edge.

  I pull my hand back with a yelp. There’s a huge crack in the skull.

  No. I must be imagining this. There is no body in this boat. It’s just a prop from Nightjar.

  Not a body. Definitely not her body.

  But . . . Marie?

  It could be her. I can’t help hoping, though it feels wrong. But no. These bones have been lying here for years, not days. Long enough for her flesh to rot away, for her hair to turn brittle.

  It is Lorelei lying next to me.

  I sit, listening to the cave’s noises for an answer that doesn’t come. There’s only the chatter now. Tears run down my face, but I don’t wipe them away. I don’t want to touch my skin after touching . . . that.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP . . .

  That chattering sound . . . I remember that sound. It unravels something in me.

  “You told me we’d go on an adventure,” I whisper to the dark, but it’s Lorelei I’m talking to. “But you needed to settle some things back home in Harrow Lake first.”

  More fragments of that long-ago memory unpick themselves from my mind.

  “But you left me behind.”

  No. The words don’t feel right. Don’t feel true.

  She took me with her, but then Grandmother called Nolan and told him where we were and Nolan drove all the way from Chicago to get us. Took us back home. And I was secretly relieved because Lorelei had seemed so unhappy in Harrow Lake. I was glad we were going home to Nolan—until the shouting started. I remember the argument, that awful record playing at full volume.

  The chatter breaks down the shards, rearranging the stories I’ve been told, the things Nolan said over and over until I believed . . .

  He lied. Lorelei didn’t abandon me. We left together. If Grandmother hadn’t called Nolan and told him where we were . . . The door to my room closed, protecting my little ears; the gramophone turned way up. “T’ain’t No Sin.”

  But the song, as loud as it was, couldn’t drown out the yelling. The banging.

  “Stop it! Nolan, don’t! You’re hurting me!”

  “You’re hurting me,” I mutter. It was her voice—it was Lorelei screaming. An awful scream that cut off like a record with a needle scratch. And I crept from my room to see . . .

  Blood in the cracks.

  Running in straight lines between the floor tiles. A pale, slender hand lying limp, just visible through the gap in the door. And a shadow falling as Nolan appeared, filling the whole world. “Get back in your room, Lola! Damn it—get out of here!”

  Lorelei, lying dead.

  She tried to leave him. She took me with her . . . But he found us. Then she was lying there, blood pooling around her. Blood on my father’s hand as he slammed the door. The hiss and hitch of the gramophone needle reaching the end of its journey. Nowhere else to go.

  That is the sound I heard the day my mother died. The same sound I heard the night I went to knock on Nolan’s puzzle door, so angry about yet another move, and his Didn’t I tell you? cracking me open, breaking through the bubble where I’d buried that secret from years before. Buried so I could keep on loving him, even after what he did. All the blood . . . the blood . . .

  I see another image now: Nolan storming after me into the hallway. “Where do you think you’re going? Get back here!”

  “No. I’m leaving.”

  “You think you can just walk out on me? Turn your back on me like I’m nothing? You’re just like Lorelei!”

  And that was it—her name on his lips. The one thing we never talked about. Buried deep, deep down. There it was.

  “Why couldn’t you let her go? Mom was going to take me with her, I heard her. She told you over and over again that you would crush me unless she took me away! Crush me, the way you crushed her!”

  “Don’t you dare speak to me that way! You’ll do whatever I tell you, when I tell you. I’ll NEVER let you leave me.”

  Cornered at the front door of the apartment. My hand holding a kitchen knife. My head full of NEVER.

  “Let me go!”

  Oh God. It was me. It was me, it was me, it was me.

  I couldn’t stop the rage pulsing through my veins in a burning, black wave. And the moment the blade sank deep felt so right, so inevitable, that I did it again.

  “Stop it, Lola!”

  And again.

  “Blood in the cracks,” I mumble into the darkness, and the cave swallows it. I’m so cold, so tired, and my body throbs. I close my eyes to rest. Just for a minute.

  I must doze, because the cave is suddenly quiet like a tomb. The bones lie next to me, exactly as they were before. Lorelei’s bones. I can’t see her, but I know now that I’ve found her.

  All this time, I’ve waited for her to come back for me, when deep down I always knew she couldn’t. She was here, waiting to be found. And now that eavesdropped conversation between Larry and Nolan swims through my head, but in a new light—Nolan’s she was going to leave me and Larry’s I’ve taken care of it.

  I know what they meant now. What Nolan did to Lorelei. How Larry covered for him by bringing my mother’s body back to this place to hide her away like a shameful secret. Where, if she was ever found, it would look like her death was an accident. Or as if someone else—someone from Harrow Lake—had done this terrible thing to her.

  “I can’t stay with you,” I whisper.

  And she wouldn’t want me to stay, here in the dark. She wouldn’t want me to be afraid. I know that. I remember. She was brave and wanted me to grow up to be brave, too. How did I forget her?

  I reach into my jeans pocket and take out the jitterbug. I can leave that with her, at least. I open the lid and am about to lay it next to my mother when I notice the bug inside is glowing. That white-and-red pattern on the jitterbug’s back glows in the dark, just like the paint inside the ghost train. The white-and-red pattern on the bug’s back morphs into the face o
f Mister Jitters.

  The pieces finally snap into place.

  Daddy says I’m not to tell tales, or Mister Jitters will come get me.

  Keep your secrets safe.

  Carter was right. Not about me writing the notes, but about what Mister Jitters is: a darkness more real, more terrifying, than any monster.

  Lorelei’s father made this for her. He painted that secret message into it—the monster’s face. It was a reminder. A threat.

  Daddy says I’m not to tell tales . . .

  He used a nightmare to keep her from revealing their awful secret.

  . . . or Mister Jitters will come get me.

  I didn’t want to see it before, wanted so badly to have a connection to my mother—even if that connection was a monster—that I ignored the real truth in her words.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Lorelei. “I believe you.”

  Mister Jitters isn’t the only monster this town has created, and Lorelei knew that.

  I won’t leave the white jitterbug next to my mother’s body. She deserves better. I tighten my grip on it, preparing to throw it into the icy blackness. Then I hear it. That sound, his song, weaving black threads as it bounces from rock to rock, thrumming over the water. I mouth the words with trembling lips.

  “Rat-a-tat-tat—such a terrifying sound!

  With a jitter-jitter-jitter, he’s stirring underground!

  Tick-tock, tick-tock—better watch out, he’s gonna snap-snap-snap your bones . . .”

  My heart beats like a hummingbird’s wings. The cavern is shifting, yawning awake. He’s coming. The jitterbug in my hand chatters a warning.

  Then I see him. Two glinting points of light in the darkness. Coming closer. Closer. I scramble back. Away from him. From it. The gondola judders as it hits a rock or a bank. I slip, and my fingers brush against my mother’s hair one last time.