by Riley Sager
Dane zeroes in on the bookshelves along the wall. I go to my father’s desk, getting uncomfortable flashbacks to when Allie and I emptied my father’s apartment a week after his death. It was rough. The entire place smelled like him—a soothing combo of wool, aftershave, and old books. Every item dropped into a cardboard box felt as though a part of his existence was being locked away where no one could see it. Every tattered cardigan. Each worn-edged book. I was erasing my father piece by piece, and it gutted me.
Worse still was finding a box of manuscripts in his office closet, sitting with his old typewriter and a set of rarely used golf clubs. It turned out he had written five books after House of Horrors. All of them fiction. All unpublished. One included a letter from his longtime agent, saying no one wanted anything other than another ghost story.
Now I open the top drawer of my father’s desk slowly, steeling myself for similar signs of his failure. There’s nothing in it but pens, paper clips, and a magnifying glass.
The next drawer, though, holds a surprise.
A copy of the Book.
I pick it up and blow dust from the cover. It’s a hardcover. First edition. I can tell because it’s the only one not to feature the words all writers dream of having on their book jacket: New York Times bestseller. Every edition after this one wore them like a badge of honor.
The cover is a good one, which many say attributed to the Book’s initial success. It’s an illustration of Baneberry Hall as seen from an angle not attainable in real life. A bird’s-eye view of a tall, crooked house on a hill. There’s a light on in the third floor—the very same floor in which Dane and I now stand—the greenish glow seeping through the round windows, making it look like Baneberry Hall is watching you. The forest encroaches on the house from all directions, the trees bending toward it, as if waiting to do its bidding.
This is the edition I read, back when I was nine. I knew my father had written a book. I knew it was a big deal. I remembered the interviews and TV crews and studio lights that hurt my eyes.
What I didn’t understand—not really—was what the book was about and why people treated my family differently from everyone else. I eventually found out from a classmate named Kelly, who told me she had to disinvite me from her upcoming birthday party. “My mom says your dad wrote an evil book and that I’m not supposed to be friends with you,” she said.
That weekend, I snuck into my dad’s office and took his first-edition copy down from the shelf. For the next month, I consumed it in secret, like it was a dirty magazine. By flashlight under the covers. After school, before my father got home from the writing class he taught just to stay busy. Once, when I’d brazenly shoved the book in my backpack and took it to school, I skipped third period to read it in the girls’ bathroom.
It was thrilling, reading something forbidden. I finally understood why my classmates had been so giddy about stealing their older sisters’ copies of Flowers in the Attic. But it was also deeply unsettling to see my parents’ names—to see my name—in a book about things I had no memory of.
Even more disconcerting was how my father had turned me into a character that in no way resembled the real me, even though only four years separated us. I saw nothing of myself in the Book’s Maggie. I thought I was smart and capable and fearless. I picked up spiders and scrambled to the top of the jungle gym. The Maggie in the Book was shy and awkward. A weirdo loner. And it hurt knowing it was my own father who had portrayed me that way. Was that what he thought I was like? When he looked at me, did he see only a scared little girl? Did everyone?
Finishing the Book left me feeling slightly abused. I had been exploited, even though I didn’t quite understand that at the time. All I knew then was that I felt confused and humiliated and misrepresented.
Not to mention angry.
So fucking furious that my younger self didn’t know what to do with it. It took me weeks to finally confront my parents about it, during one of their custody exchanges in which I was handed off like a relay baton.
“You lied about me!” I shouted as I waved the Book in front of them. “Why would you do that?”
My mother told me the Book was something we didn’t discuss. My father gave me his scripted answer for the very first time.
“What happened, happened, Mags. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“But you did!” I cried. “The girl in this book isn’t me.”
“Of course it’s you,” my mother said, trying hard to end the conversation.
“But I’m nothing like her!” I’d started to cry then, which made me all the more humiliated. I’d wanted to be stronger in the face of their resistance. “I’m either the girl in this book, or I’m me. So which one is it?”
My parents refused to provide an answer. My mother left me with a kiss on the cheek, and my father took me out for ice cream. Defeated, I swallowed my anger, gulping it down like a bitter pill, thus setting the course for the rest of my adolescence. Silence from my mother, denial from my father, and me starting a yearslong secret search for more information.
A little of that nine-year-old’s anger returns as I flip through the Book, scanning passages I’ve long committed to memory.
“I really hate this book,” I say.
Dane gives me a curious look. “I’ve heard it’s good.”
“It’s not. Not really.”
That’s another aspect of the Book I find so frustrating—its inexplicable success. Critics weren’t kind, calling the writing pedestrian and the plot derivative. With reviews like that, it shouldn’t have become as big as it did. But it was something different in a nonfiction landscape that, at the time, had been dominated by books about getting rich through prayer, murder in Savannah, and barely contained Ebola outbreaks. As a result, it became one of those things people read because everyone else was reading it.
I continue to page through the Book, stopping cold when a two-sentence passage catches my eye.
“Maggie, there’s no one here.”
“There is!” she cried. “They’re all here! I told you they’d be mad!”
I slam the Book shut and drop it on the desk.
“You can have this, if you want,” I tell Dane. “In fact, you can take pretty much anything in this room. Not that it’s worth anything. I’m not sure there’s a market for household junk found in bogus haunted houses.”
There are two closets, one on each side of the room, their doors slanted to accommodate the vaulted ceiling. We each take one, Dane’s opening with a rusty creak.
“Nothing in here but suitcases,” he says.
I cross the room and peer over his shoulder. Sitting on the closet floor are two square cases. We drag them out of the closet and each open one. Inside Dane’s is a record player. Inside mine is an album collection. The record on top is a familiar title: The Sound of Music.
Seeing them gives me the same creeping sense of unease I felt last night when I realized my father hadn’t lied about leaving everything behind. I do an involuntary shimmy, trying to shake it away. Just because they exist doesn’t mean what my father wrote is true. I need to remember that. Baneberry Hall is likely filled with things mentioned in the Book.
Write what you know. My father’s favorite piece of advice.
“It’s junk,” I say as I stalk back to my closet. “We should toss it.”
Dane does the opposite and lifts the record player onto the desk. The case of records soon follows. “We should give it a spin,” he says while sorting through the albums. “Showtunes or, uh, showtunes?”
“I prefer silence,” I say, an edge to my voice.
Dane gets the hint and backs away from the desk, joining me at the second closet as I pull the door open.
Inside is a teddy bear.
It sits on the floor, back against the wall like a hostage, its once-brown fur turned ashen from years of dust. One
of its black-button eyes has fallen off, leaving a squiggle of thread poking from its fur like an exposed optic nerve. Around the bear’s neck is a red bow tie, the ends squashed, as if it had been hugged too tightly for too long.
“Was this yours?” Dane says. He gives the bear a squeeze, and a puff of dust rises off its shoulders.
“No,” I say. “At least, I don’t think so. I have no memory of it.”
A thought occurs to me. A sad one. It’s possible this bear had once been Katie Carver’s and was left behind, like so many of the family’s belongings. My father, not knowing what to do with it, might have stuck it in the closet and forgotten about it.
I take the bear from Dane, set it on the desk next to the record player, and return to the closet. There’s something else inside, perched on a top shelf.
A blue shoebox.
Just like the one my father claimed to have found in the Book. Filled with strange pictures of Katie’s father.
My unease returns. Stronger now, and more insidious. With trembling hands, I take the box to the desk and open it, already knowing what I’ll find inside: a Polaroid camera and a stack of photos.
I’m right on both counts.
The camera fills one end of the box, clunky and heavy. The photos—five of them in all—lie haphazardly beside it. But instead of Curtis Carver’s vacant stare, the first photo I see is, shockingly, of me. Like the one in the parlor, it bears only the faintest resemblance to me.
I’m wearing jeans and a Batman T-shirt in the photo, which was snapped in front of Baneberry Hall, the house lurking in the background like an eavesdropper. Its presence means I was five at the time. Because there’s no scar on my cheek, I also assume it was taken in the first three days of our stay. There’s not even a bandage.
It’s also missing in the next photo, which shows me standing with two other girls, one roughly my age and the other much older. We’re in my bedroom, lined up in front of the armoire, our eyes glowing red from the flash and giving us the look of demon children.
The younger girl I recognize. I saw the same features in the face of the woman I met last night. The only difference is a present-day hardness not evident in this younger version of herself.
Hannah Ditmer.
Which means the older girl in the photo is Petra.
She’s so pretty it takes my breath away. Long limbs, creamy skin, blond hair that’s been piled atop her head. Unlike Hannah and me, who stand stiff-backed with our arms at our sides, Petra strikes a playful pose. Hand on her hip. One leg bent in a backward kick. Flash of bare feet, toenails painted red.
We’re dressed for sleep, Hannah and me in pajamas, Petra in a large white T-shirt and Umbro shorts. She also wears a necklace—a tiny crucifix hanging from a slender gold chain.
I remember that night. Or at least the Book’s version of it. The sleepover gone terribly wrong. It was one of the first things nine-year-old me obsessed about—how I had absolutely no memory of that horrifying night. I spent nights awake, scared that what I’d read was true. Because it was indeed scary. A kind of nightmare-in-a-horror-movie scenario that no one would want to experience. But I had and couldn’t recall any of it, which meant that something must have been terribly wrong with me.
After several sleepless nights staring at the ceilings in both of my bedrooms in both of my parents’ separate homes, I began to realize that the reason I couldn’t remember the events in the Book was because they never happened.
I had assumed that included the sleepover.
But according to this Polaroid, I was wrong. There was, at some point in our twenty days at Baneberry Hall, a time when Hannah and Petra had spent the night.
At least part of it.
Petra’s in the next photo as well, standing in the kitchen with my mother. The two of them stare up at a giant hole in the ceiling in a pose of unintended synchronicity. Both in profile, their heads tilted back and their throats exposed, they could pass for mother and daughter. It makes me wonder if my mother ever saw this photograph and, if so, how it felt to see herself pictured with a younger woman of a similar nature. A girly girl. The kind of daughter she’d never have.
There are two other people in the photo, overlapping in the background. In front is an older man in flannel and jeans making his way up a ladder. Behind him is someone younger, barely visible. All I can make out is a crescent of face, a bent elbow, half of a black T-shirt, and a sliver of denim.
Walt Hibbets and my father. Two days after the kitchen incident.
Like the sleepover, it’s one of the most famous passages in the Book. And, if this photo is to be believed, also similarly rooted in truth.
I hold both Polaroids side by side, studying them, my stomach slowly filling with a queasiness that began the moment I found the shoebox. It’s the sinking feeling that comes with bad news, dashed hopes, sudden heartbreak.
It’s the feeling of realizing what you thought was a lie might be true.
Part of me knows that’s completely ridiculous. The Book is fiction, despite having the words A True Story slapped on its cover, right below the title. My mother said as much. Yet a tiny voice in the back of my head whispers that maybe, just maybe, I could be wrong. It’s the same voice that last night, right before Elsa Ditmer made her presence known, suggested the person inside the Indigo Room could have been Mister Shadow.
I hear it now, hissing in my ear.
You know it’s true. You’ve always known.
What makes it so unnerving is that I recognize that insistent whisper.
It’s my father. Sounding just like he did right before he died.
I hear it again when I fish the last two photos out of the box. The first is a shot of my father performing a prototypical selfie. Arm extended. Chin lowered. Swatch of bare wall in the background over his left shoulder. He stares straight at the camera, which makes it seem as if he’s looking beyond it, into the future, his eyes locking on mine through a distance of twenty-five years.
Never go back there, his voice says. It’s not safe there. Not for you.
Hoping my father’s whisper will go away if I’m not longer looking at his face, I flip to the last Polaroid. It was taken at a vertiginous angle from one of the windows that overlook the backyard. On the ground are two people entering the woods.
One of them is my mother.
The other is me at age five.
It’s exactly like the photo my father described in the Book. The one he took when he found the Polaroid camera. My gaze drifts against my will, moving to the left of the frame, simultaneously knowing and fearing what I’ll find there.
Sure enough, hugging the edge of the frame is a dark shape hiding among the trees.
It could be a tree trunk, darkened by shadow.
It could also be a person.
I can’t quite tell because the picture quality is so poor. It’s grainy and slightly out of focus, giving everything a jittery blur. Despite that, the dark form bears a distinct human shape.
But the worst part about the figure is that it’s standing near the same spot as the person I saw last night. That could be a coincidence. But the churning unease in my stomach tells me it’s not.
My father’s imaginary whisper pipes up again.
It’s Mister Shadow. You know it’s him.
But Mister Shadow isn’t real. Just like the Book isn’t real.
I continue to stare at the photo, thinking about what happened moments after it was taken. My hand flutters to my cheek, my fingertips touching the slash of smooth skin under my eye. I realize the scar is yet another bit of proof that the Book—fantastical though it may be—contains strands of truth.
I drop the pictures on the desk, where they spill across its surface. The one on top is the selfie of my father, his eyes looking right into mine, as if he already knows what I’m about to do next.
Exit the
office, leaving Dane alone.
Head outside, past the truck, weaving through the equipment on the lawn, and moving around to the back of the house.
Pass the exterior wall overtaken by ivy, their tendrils climbing all the way to a second-floor window.
Push into the shadow-shrouded woods in a one-woman re-creation of my father’s photograph and hurtle down the hillside, swishing through weeds, passing bright red swaths of baneberries, tripping over tree roots.
Finally, I come to a stop at a cluster of marble blocks jutting from the earth like rotten teeth.
The cemetery.
Yet another thing my father wasn’t lying about.
Behind me, Dane calls my name. He’s in the woods now, too, catching up to me. He freezes when he sees the gravestones.
“Whoa,” he says.
“My thoughts exactly.”
I kneel in front of the nearest stone, wipe the dirt away, see a name carved into the marble.
Then I begin to laugh.
I can’t believe I thought—even for just a moment—that the Book was true. It shows how good of a liar my father was and how greatly I’d underestimated his talent. Of course he sprinkled House of Horrors with real-life events and places. If there’s an honest-to-God cemetery on your property, it’s only natural to mention it. When you throw enough facts into your fiction, tangling them together like a nest of snakes, some people are bound to believe it. Politicians do it all the time.
And for a second there, I did believe. It was hard not to after encountering so many things mentioned in the Book. The record player. The photograph of me and my mother. The sleepover and the kitchen ceiling and the graveyard. All of it made me think the Book was real.
But now I look at the name on the gravestone and realize I was right all along—the Book is bullshit.
ROVER
He was a good dog
Dane, now at my side, stares at the stone and says, “This is a freaking pet cemetery?”
“Looks like it,” I say. “If not, the Garsons were one seriously messed-up family.”
