by Riley Sager
I shake my head, disappointed by my own uncertainty. Of course it’s bullshit. I’ve known that since I was nine.
Then why am I still here at the dining room table with the Book in front of me? Why did I feel compelled to sit down and read the chapter about the sleepover in the first place? Why am I on the verge of reading it a second time?
I want to think it’s because doing a deep dive into House of Horrors is easier than facing the idea that my father might have killed Petra. It’s a much-needed distraction. Nothing more.
But I know better. I’ve seen too many similarities between real life and the Book to dismiss it outright, and I can’t shake the feeling that something eerie is happening. Something strange enough to make my hands tremble as I open the Book.
Then close it.
Then open it again.
Then throw it across the dining room, where it hits the wall in an angry flutter of pages.
I grab my phone, checking to see if my mother returned my call while I was reading. She hasn’t. I call again. When it goes straight to her voicemail, I hang up without leaving a message. What am I going to say? Hi, Mom, did you know about the body in the ceiling, and did Dad do it, and did I really see ghosts as a child?
I drop the phone onto the table and reach for my dinner—a bag of tortilla chips and a can of mixed nuts. Although there’s enough food in the house for several meals, cooking isn’t in the cards. After what happened in the kitchen, I want to spend as little time there as possible. So I stuff some chips into my mouth and wash them down with a beer. That’s followed by some nuts, which I chomp while eyeing the Book, now splayed on the floor. I’m tempted to pick it up. Instead, I grab the Polaroids I found in my father’s study.
The first one is the picture of my mother and me entering the woods. On the far side of the frame is that dark shape I thought might have been a person but is clearly a tree in shadow.
Next is the one from the sleepover, with me and Hannah as minor players in the Petra Show. I study her pose—the hand on her hip, the bent leg, the lips parted in a flirty smile. I can’t help but think she was putting herself on display for my father.
Petra had a boyfriend, Hannah had said. Or something.
Could that have been my father? Was he capable of betraying my mother like that? Even though he once told me my mother was the only woman he’d ever loved, sometimes love has nothing to do with it.
I move to the next photo—the ceiling repairs in the kitchen, which has a new, morbid significance after the events of the past few days. Now it’s a picture of a sixteen-year-old girl looking directly at the spot where her remains would be discovered twenty-five years later. Seeing it makes me quiver so hard the chair shakes.
I push that Polaroid away and look at the one of me standing in front of Baneberry Hall, struck by something interesting. I don’t have a bandage under my left eye, which led me to assume it had been taken immediately after we moved in. But when I take another look at the picture from the sleepover, there’s no bandage there, either. Nor is there a cut, bruise, or any other sign of damage, even though according to the Book, the sleepover happened after I’d hurt myself on the gravestone in the woods.
I gather all the Polaroids and slide them around the table like mahjong pieces, putting them in chronological order based on the events in the Book.
First is me outside Baneberry Hall, smiling and guileless. The girl I never thought I was but now worry I might truly have been.
Second is my mother and me stepping into the forest behind the house.
Third is the sleepover, and fourth is the shot taken in the kitchen.
The fifth, the selfie of my father, could have been taken at any time, although it strikes me as being toward the end of our stay. He looks haggard. Like something had been weighing on his thoughts.
I know there was a bandage at some point because Chief Alcott told me she noticed it when interviewing my father at the Two Pines. Also, I have the scar to prove it.
If it wasn’t on our third day here, which is what the Book claims, then when did it happen?
And how did I get it?
And why did my father fudge the facts?
A rhetorical question. I already know the answer. He did it because the Book is bull—
I’m stopped mid-thought by a voice from elsewhere in the house, singing a song that roils my stomach.
“You are sixteen, going on seventeen—”
I grip the table’s edge, buzzing with fear. Hannah’s words again streak into my thoughts: It’s all true. Every damn word.
The song keeps playing, louder now, as if someone’s just cranked the volume.
“Baby, it’s time to think.”
Bullshit. That’s what I think.
There’s no ghost in this house.
But there is a ghoul.
“Better beware, be canny and careful—”
I bolt from the dining room and pass through the great room. The chandelier is on again, even though I’m certain I haven’t touched its switch in days.
When I reach the front door, I find it’s still locked. The slip of paper I stuck in the doorframe when I returned from the Ditmers’ remains in place.
“Baby, you’re on the brink.”
The windows are also locked. I checked them earlier. If this is a ghoul—and of course it is—how did they get inside?
There’s only one way to find out.
The song continues to play as I tiptoe up the stairs, trying hard not to make a sound. If I’m going to catch whoever’s doing this, I need surprise on my side.
The music gets louder when I reach the second floor, which actually works to my advantage. It covers the sound of my footsteps as I pad into my bedroom and take the knife from the nightstand.
I move down the hallway, gripping the knife so tight my knuckles turn white. They remain that way as I climb the steps to the third floor. On the other side of the closed study door, the song continues to pulse.
I throw open the door and burst inside, announcing my presence with a primal scream and a jabbing knife.
The study is empty.
Almost.
On the desk, suddenly back again, is Buster.
* * *
—
I stand in the driveway, hugging myself against the evening chill as Chief Alcott finishes her sweep of Baneberry Hall. I called her immediately after finding Buster and met her at the front gate. All the reporters had disbursed for the night, thank God. Had they stayed, they would have seen me unlocking the gate with trembling hands, pale as a ghost.
Upon her arrival, Chief Alcott checked the outside of the house first, circling it with a flashlight swept back and forth across the exterior walls. Now she’s inside, checking the windows. I see her from the driveway—a dark figure framed in an eyelike window on the third floor.
When she’s done, she steps onto the porch and says, “There’s no sign of a break-in.”
It’s exactly what I don’t want to hear. Something that pointed to forced entry—say, a broken window—would be a much better alternative to the reality I now face. Which is that there’s no rational explanation for the record player turning on, or the sudden reappearance of Buster.
“Are you sure what you think happened actually, you know, happened?” she asks.
I hug myself tighter. “You think I’m making this up?”
“I didn’t say that,” the chief replies. “But I’m not discounting the possibility that your imagination is running a little wild right now. It wouldn’t surprise me, considering what you found in the kitchen the other day. That would make anyone jumpy.”
“I know what I saw,” I say. “And I know what I heard.”
“Maggie, I looked everywhere. There’s absolutely no way an intruder could have gotten inside this house.”
“What if—
” I try to stop myself, knowing it will sound absurd. But it’s too late. The words are already rolling off my tongue. “What if it’s not an intruder?”
Chief Alcott squints at me. “What else can it be?”
“What if the things my father wrote were true?”
This time I can’t even try to stop what I am saying. The words surprise even me. Chief Alcott appears less surprised than angry. I notice her nostrils flare.
“You’re telling me you now think Baneberry Hall is haunted?”
“I’m telling you that something deeply weird is happening here,” I say. “I’m not lying to you.”
At first, I think I sound just like my father did in the later chapters of House of Horrors. Confused and scared and borderline crazy from sleep deprivation. But then it hits me—a realization as disorienting as a sucker punch.
I sound like the me my father wrote about.
I’ve become the Maggie from the Book.
“I like you, Maggie,” Chief Alcott says. “You seem smart. Good head on your shoulders. That’s why I’m giving you the chance to stop this now and not take it any further.”
“Stop what?”
“Doing the same thing your father did,” the chief says. “He hurt this town. He hurt the Ditmers. And I’m certain he killed Petra Ditmer. He got away with it because he told that stupid ghost story of his and enough people were distracted by it. Including me. But I won’t let you do the same thing. Now that we’re on to what he did, I won’t have you muddying the waters again with stories about this house being haunted. I refuse to let you write a fucking sequel.”
She storms to her cruiser and is gone seconds later, the car’s taillights glowing an angry red as they disappear down the hill.
I follow her down the long, winding driveway and lock the gate, wondering if that alone is enough to keep whatever the hell is going on from continuing to happen. I hope so, even though I doubt it. Right now, the Book is more real than it’s ever been.
And I don’t want to relive it.
I don’t want to be that scared girl my father wrote about.
When I return to the house, the only other preventative measure I can think of is to march to the third floor, grab the record player, and carry it onto the front lawn. I then fetch the sledgehammer from the nearby pile of equipment. I lift it onto my shoulder, my triceps quivering from the strain.
Then, with a mighty swing, I bring the sledgehammer down and smash the record player into pieces.
JULY 8
Day 13
Jess and I sat in the waiting room, not speaking. Something we’d done a lot of in the previous twelve hours. There wasn’t a whole lot to say. We both already knew that something was profoundly wrong with our daughter.
The only words I had said to my wife since the fiasco the night before were, “I found a child psychologist who can see Maggie today. The appointment’s at eleven.”
“Great,” Jess replied, the third of three words she’d spoken to me. The other two were after Elsa Ditmer had picked up her daughters amid a flurry of apologies from both of us. “They’re gone,” she had said, unintentionally repeating the same thing Maggie uttered after punching Hannah Ditmer.
Those words repeated themselves in my head long after both Maggie and Jess had spoken them. I still heard them—in both my wife’s and daughter’s voices—as I glumly looked around the waiting room of Dr. Lila Weber.
Because she was a child psychologist, I had expected Dr. Weber’s office to be more child-friendly than it was. Toys by the door and the Wiggles playing in the background. Instead, the waiting room was as beige and bland as a dentist’s office. A disappointment, seeing how I needed something to take my mind off the fact that Maggie had been speaking to Dr. Weber for almost an hour and that in mere minutes we’d find out just how messed up she truly was. A girl who behaved the way she did during the sleepover would have to be. And I wondered if Jess and I were to blame.
Maggie was an accident. A happy one, it turned out, but an accident nonetheless. One of the reasons Jess and I got married as quickly as we did was because she got pregnant. Since I loved Jess completely and we’d planned to wed eventually anyway, we saw no reason to delay the inevitable.
Yet the idea of being a father was terrifying to me. My own father was, by his own admission, a rotten cuss of a man. He drank too much and was quick to anger. Even though I knew he loved my mother and me, he rarely showed it. I worried I’d become exactly like him.
But then Maggie was born.
Jess’s final month of pregnancy had been hard on her, and the difficulty continued in the delivery room. When Maggie emerged, she announced her arrival with silence. There was no crying. No delighted looks from nurses. I knew then that something had gone wrong.
It turned out that the umbilical cord had been wrapped around Maggie’s neck, nearly strangling her to death at her moment of birth. That fraught moment of silence while the nurses worked to save Maggie was the most frightening moment of my life. Unable to do anything but wait—and hope—I gripped Jess’s hand and prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in. I made a promise to him that if Maggie pulled through, I’d be the best father I possibly could.
Then at last Maggie began to cry—a full-throated wail that filled my heart with joy. My prayer had been answered. Right there and then, I vowed to do whatever it took to protect her.
As I waited in Dr. Weber’s office that morning, I worried my protection wouldn’t be enough and that whatever was wrong with Maggie was beyond my control. Yet she looked normal when she emerged from Dr. Weber’s inner office, sucking on a lollipop and showing off a sticker on her hand.
“You’ve been so good today, Maggie,” the psychologist said. “Now I need you to be good for just a few more minutes while I chat with your parents, okay?”
Maggie nodded. “Okay.”
Dr. Weber gave Jess and me a warm smile. “Mom and Dad, come this way.”
The two of us stepped into her office and took a seat on the beige couch reserved for patients. Dr. Weber sat across from us, her face a mask of calmness. I searched it for signs that our daughter was severely damaged and it was all our fault.
“First, Maggie is fine,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“One hundred percent. She has an extraordinary imagination, which is a wonderful gift. But it also comes with its own set of difficulties.”
The main one, as laid out by Dr. Weber, was an occasional inability to distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. Maggie’s imagination was so vivid that sometimes when she interacted with her imaginary friends, she truly believed they were there.
“That’s what seems to have happened last night,” the doctor said. “She thought those imaginary friends—”
“Ghosts,” I interjected. “She called them ghosts.”
Dr. Weber nodded in response, squinting ever so slightly to show how hard she was listening. I found it insufferable.
“We’ll get to that,” she said. “Back to last night. She thought—truly thought—there were others in the room, and her behavior followed suit.”
“Is that why Maggie hit the neighbor girl?” Jess asked.
“It is,” Dr. Weber said. “From the way Maggie described it, I think it was more a reflex than any innate sense of violence or attempt to cause harm. The best way I can describe it is like a dog snapping at someone when he’s cornered and terrified. In that moment, Maggie simply didn’t know what to do and lashed out.”
That didn’t explain everything. The closet door, the armoire, Hannah screaming that something had touched her.
And that noise.
The one under the bed.
That wasn’t just Maggie’s imagination. I had heard it.
“I want to know more about the ghosts,” I said.
Dr. Weber’s smile grew s
trained. “They’re not really ghosts, of course. Going forward, I think it would be best to refer to them as imaginings.”
“Maggie thinks they’re real,” I said.
“Which is something we’ll have to work on,” Dr. Weber said.
“Did she tell you about them?”
“She did, yes. She has three consistent imaginings.” She put extra emphasis on the word for my benefit. “One is a little girl she occasionally talks to. Another is a young woman she calls Miss Pennyface.”
“Don’t forget Mister Shadow,” I said, because Maggie sure couldn’t.
“He’s the one she fears the most,” Dr. Weber said.
“If these are all just—” I stopped myself before saying imaginary friends, choosing instead Dr. Weber’s preferred term. “If these are imaginings, why is Maggie so afraid of them?”
“Children have dark thoughts, too,” Dr. Weber said. “Just like adults. They’re also good listeners. They pick up a lot more than we think they do. When problems like this occur, it’s because the child is having a hard time processing what they’ve heard. Something bad happened in your home. Something tragic. Maggie knows that, but she doesn’t know how to grapple with it.”
“So what should we do?” I said.
“My advice? Be honest with her. Explain—in terms that she can understand—what happened, how it was a sad thing, and how that won’t ever happen again.”
* * *
• • •
That night, we took Dr. Weber’s advice and sat Maggie down at the kitchen table, armed with some of her favorite treats. Hot chocolate. Sugar cookies. A pack of sour gummy worms.
Also on the table, at a slight remove from everything else, was the Gazette article about Curtis and Katie Carver I’d photocopied at the library.
“Before we moved in,” Jess said, “something happened in this house. Something bad. And very sad.”
“I know,” Maggie said. “Hannah told me.”
I groaned. Of course.
“Did she tell you exactly what happened?” I said.
“A mean man killed his daughter and then killed himself.”
