by Riley Sager
The second and third bells on the second row rang one last time.
NO
I was about to respond, but then the bells sprang to life again. Three rings followed by the shortest of pauses and then the same run of six bells and eight letters I’d just seen. Again, it took me a moment to figure it out.
When I did, I let out a gasp so loud and sudden that it echoed off the kitchen walls.
HER PORTRAIT
I rushed upstairs and moved through the great room. When I reached the front staircase, I looked up to see the chandelier aglow, even though it had been dark the last time I passed beneath it.
A sign that spirits were active. I felt foolish for not realizing it sooner.
I kept moving. Past the staircase. Into the Indigo Room. I didn’t stop until I was at the fireplace, looking up at the portrait Curtis had been referring to.
Indigo Garson.
I stared at the painting, wondering what I was supposed to be seeing. Nothing seemed amiss about it. It was a portrait of a young woman painted by a man who had been in love with her.
I didn’t find anything strange about that.
But then I looked to the white rabbit Indigo held in her hands. I’d previously noticed the chip of missing paint at the animal’s left eye. Considering it was the portrait’s only flaw, it was hard to miss. But it also drew the eye away from the fact that the rabbit had been rendered in a slightly different manner than everything else. It wasn’t as detailed as the rest of the painting, as if it had been the work of an entirely different artist.
I moved close, studying the rabbit’s fur, which lacked the individual brushstrokes of Indigo’s shining hair. The paint there was thicker as well. Not overtly so. Just raised slightly higher than everything else. When I zeroed in on the rabbit’s missing eye, I saw within its socket another layer of paint behind it.
Someone had painted over the portrait.
Using a thumbnail, I scraped at the paint surrounding the rabbit’s eye. It fell off in tiny flecks that dusted the fireplace mantel. Each piece that was chipped away revealed a little bit more of the original portrait. Grays and red and browns.
I kept scraping until a sliver of paint lodged itself under my thumbnail—a needle prick of pain that shot through my entire hand. After that, I switched to a putty knife fished out of the utility drawer in the kitchen and kept scraping.
Slowly.
Methodically.
Careful not to also scrape the paint below, which emerged not unlike a freshly taken Polaroid. Color appearing from an expanse of white until the full picture was formed.
It wasn’t until the rabbit had been completely chipped away that my body succumbed to exhaustion. It began with dizziness, which overtook me at alarming speed. I staggered backward, the room spinning.
Everything went gray, and I realized I was falling. I hit the floor and remained there, sprawled on my back, the gray that swarmed my vision darkening into blackness.
Before I passed out, I caught one good look at the original portrait, now freshly exposed.
Indigo Garson, looking as angelic as she always had. Same alabaster skin and golden curls and beatific expression.
But it was no longer a rabbit held in her daintily gloved hands.
It was a snake.
Twenty-Two
I need your help.”
There’s silence on Dane’s end—an uncertainty evident even over the phone. I don’t blame him. Not after the things I’ve said. I’d understand if he wanted nothing more to do with me.
After tonight, he just might get that wish.
“With what?” he eventually says.
“Moving an armoire.”
I don’t tell him that the armoire needs not to be moved, but disassembled completely. And that the hole in the bedroom wall it will leave behind needs to be sealed shut. And that there’s a door in the back of the house that will also need to be boarded up so no one will be able to enter Baneberry Hall without a key. All of that can wait until he gets here. Otherwise he might hang up.
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Dane says.
“It can’t. I need your help. Please. I can’t do it alone.”
“Fine,” Dane says with an epic sigh. “I’ll be there in ten.”
“Thank you.”
Dane doesn’t hear that part. He’s already ended the call.
I shove my phone into my pocket and prepare for the job ahead. The plan is simple—block off the secret passage to the bedroom, gather up my things, and leave Baneberry Hall.
This time, I won’t be returning.
Once I’m back in Boston, I’ll list the house and sell it as is for whatever offer I get, no matter how small it might be. I no longer want anything to do with this place. Nor do I want the truth about what happened here.
I just want to be gone.
It’s not safe here. Not for me.
In the dining room, I gather the five Polaroids on the table and my father’s copy of the Book, still splayed spine-up on the floor. They’ll be going right back where I found them. Soon to be someone else’s problem.
My hands full, I march to the third-floor study and go straight to the desk, where I drop the Book and the photos. I then grab Buster and toss him into the closet where he’d first been discovered.
Much like Baneberry Hall, I never want to see that bear again.
I turn back to the desk, where the Book sits open.
It was closed when I dropped it there.
I’m certain of it.
Yet there it is, flopped open, as if someone has just been reading it.
I approach the Book slowly, considering all the ways it could have opened on its own. I can’t think of any. At least nothing that doesn’t border on the supernatural. Or, to borrow a term from Dane’s grandmother, the uncanny.
Bullshit, I think.
I then say it aloud, hoping that uttering the word will make it true.
“Bullshit.”
But it isn’t. I know that the moment I see the page the Book is open to. It’s the chapter that takes place on the Fourth of July. The day the kitchen ceiling was patched. I scan the page, one passage in particular leaping out at me.
Now it was time to patch the formidable hole in the ceiling. For that, I enlisted Hibbs, who brought a boy from town to help because the task was too big for just him alone.
My heart beats faster as I read it again and let the full weight of the words sink in.
A boy from town.
Who was in this house the same time as Petra.
Who likely knew her.
Who could have been her boyfriend. Or something.
Who might have persuaded her to sneak out her bedroom window.
Who might have suggested they run away together and became violent when Petra got second thoughts.
Who then broke into Baneberry Hall and dumped her body under the floorboards because he knew there was a hiding place there.
A boy, I realize, who’s in one of the Polaroids my father took.
I snatch the photo off the desk. When I first saw it, I’d thought it was my father standing behind Walt Hibbets and his ladder. I should have realized my father was likely behind the camera—and that it was someone else lurking in the back of the image.
I can’t see too many details, even after I bring the picture close to my face and squint. Just a narrow slice of clothing and an even smaller sliver of face poke out beyond the ladder. The only way I can get a bigger, better view is if I had a magnifying glass.
Which I realize with a delighted jolt that I do.
There’s one in the top desk drawer. I saw it there during my first trek into the study. It’s still there now, sitting among pens and paper clips. I grab it and hold it in front of the Polaroid, the mystery man now exponentially larger. I see dark ha
ir, half of a handsome face, a sturdy arm, and a broad chest.
And I see his T-shirt.
Black and emblazoned with an image that’s only half visible.
The Rolling Stones logo.
My mind flashes back to that dingy room at the Two Pines. Dane stepping inside, looking so good that I couldn’t help but stare. When he caught me, I complimented his shirt. I hear his voice loud in my memory.
I’ve had it since I was a teenager.
And I hear his voice now, coming from the study door, where he stands with his arms at his sides and a dour look on his face.
“I can explain,” he says.
JULY 15
Day 20—Before Dark
I woke up on the floor.
Where in the house, I didn’t know.
All I knew when I regained consciousness was that I was somewhere inside Baneberry Hall, flat-backed on the floor, my joints stiff and my head pounding. It wasn’t until I opened my eyes and saw the portrait of Indigo Garson staring down at me that everything came rushing back.
Me in the Indigo Room.
Scraping at the painting.
Seeing the snake in Indigo’s hands.
A snake that, the longer I looked at it, the more unnerved I became. I wanted to believe Indigo’s pose with the snake was one of those Victorian-era eccentricities. Like death masks and taxidermied birds on hats. But my gut told me there was something far more sinister behind it.
That the snake represented Indigo’s true nature.
A predator.
I assumed it was William Garson who’d ordered it painted over. An attempt to hide the truth about his daughter. I suspected he couldn’t bear to paint over the whole portrait. The artist—poor, besotted Callum Auguste—had done too good a job for that. So the rabbit replaced the snake, an ironic reversal not found in nature.
Now the snake was exposed again. With it came grim understanding that I’d been wrong about so much.
It wasn’t William Garson making fathers kill their daughters inside Baneberry Hall.
It was Indigo.
I understood it with icy clarity. Just like the snake in her hands, she slithered her way into the minds of men who lived here, making them obsessed with what happened to her. I didn’t know if she died by her own hand or her father’s. In the end, it didn’t matter. Indigo was dead, but her spirit remained. Now she spent her days seeking vengeance for what her father had done. She didn’t care that he, too, was long gone. To her, every father deserved punishment.
So she made them kill their daughters.
Six times that had happened.
There wasn’t going to be a seventh.
I made my way back to the kitchen slowly, too sore from my night on the floor to move quickly. After hobbling down the steps, I found myself in front of the bells once more.
“Curtis,” I whispered, fearful Indigo was also nearby. Lurking. Listening. “Are you there?”
Three familiar bells rang.
YES
“It was Indigo, wasn’t it? She made you kill Katie.”
Another three rings.
YES
“What can I do?” I said. “How can I stop her? How can I tell if she’s here?”
Five bells rang a total of six times. At the final chime—the first bell on the first row—I realized he had spelled a word new to this weird form of communication.
CAMERA
I knew what he was referring to. The Polaroid camera in the study.
“Thank you, Curtis.” As I whispered it, I realized I was never going to hear from him again. He’d told me everything he could. The rest was up to me. So before leaving the bells, I added a somber, sincere “I hope this frees you from this place. I really do. I hope you find peace.”
With that, I made my way up three sets of stairs, my joints creaking the entire climb. In the third-floor study, I found what I was looking for in the closet.
A blue shoebox full of Polaroids.
I sorted through them, seeking the ones I’d neglected to look at the day I discovered the box. Photo after photo of Curtis Carver’s increasingly haunted face. I wondered if, when he took them, he felt as helpless as I did. If he was as worried and racked with the same guilt that weighed on me.
The images of Curtis were so similar that I needed to look at the dates scribbled below them to indicate which ones I hadn’t already seen. July 12th. That was one was new. As were pictures from July 13th and 14th.
The last Polaroid sat facedown at the bottom of the box. Flipping it over, I saw that, like the others, the date it had been taken had been written across the bottom of the photo.
July 15th.
A year to the day since Curtis Carver killed himself.
My gaze moved from the date to the image itself. At first, it looked like the others. But a second glance revealed something different from the rest of the photos. Something deeply, deeply wrong.
Someone else was in the room with Carver.
A dark figure tucked into a far corner of the study.
Although Maggie had called her Miss Pennyface, I knew her by another name.
Indigo Garson.
She looked exactly like the woman in the portrait. Same purple dress and ethereal glow. The only difference between her painting and her ghost was her eyes.
They were covered by coins.
Yet it was clear she could still see. In the photograph, she stared at the back of Curtis Carver’s head, almost as if she could read his thoughts.
I was still studying the picture when a presence entered the room, invisible yet palpably felt.
“Curtis, is that you?”
I received no response.
Yet the presence increased, filling the room with a heat so strong it was almost suffocating. Inside that menacing warmth was something even more disturbing.
Anger.
It burned through the room like fire.
I grabbed the camera from the desk and took a self-portrait similar to the ones Curtis had taken.
The shutter clicked.
The camera hummed.
A picture slid out, its pristine whiteness slowly giving way to an image.
Me.
Arms extended. Staring at the camera. Expanse of study behind me.
Also behind me was Indigo Garson, edging into the frame. I saw a slender arm, the curve of her shoulder, stringy strands of blond hair.
She was there.
And she was waiting.
Not for me.
For Maggie.
“Keep waiting, bitch,” I said aloud.
I raised the camera and took another picture.
Click.
Hum.
Slide.
In that photo, Indigo had moved to the other side of the study. She pressed against the wall, slightly hunched, her coin-covered eyes peering at me through a veil of hair. Her lips were twisted into a grin so sinister it turned my blood cold.
The only thing that kept me from fleeing the house was the knowledge that she didn’t want to hurt me. Not yet, even though that moment would surely arrive. But for the time being, she needed me to get to Maggie.
Convinced I was out of harm’s way for the short term, I moved to the closet, grabbed all the packages of film sitting inside, and carried them back to the desk.
I remained there as the pale light of morning changed to the golden sun of afternoon. Every so often, I’d take another picture, just to keep track of Indigo’s whereabouts in the room. Sometimes she was in a far corner, facing the wall. Other times she was just a sliver of purple on the edge of the frame. In a few photos, she wasn’t visible at all.
But I knew she was still there.
I felt the angry heat of her presence.
I continued to feel it until the daylight outs
ide the office widows had given way to the lonesome blues of twilight. That’s when Indigo suddenly vanished—an instant cooling.
I grabbed the camera and took another picture.
Click.
Hum.
Slide.
I snatched the Polaroid from the camera and held it in front of me, watching the image take shape.
It was just like all the others—me and a woman standing in the background.
Only this time it wasn’t Indigo.
It was Jess. Standing just inside the study. Every muscle in her body tensed. Confusion streaking across her features like lightning.
I turned around slowly, hoping she was just an imagining brought about by hunger, thirst, and a need for sleep. But then Jess spoke—“Ewan? What are you doing up here?”—and my heart sank.
It meant she was real and that Indigo’s patience had paid off.
Maggie had come home.
Twenty-Three
Dane takes a step into the study. I take a step back, pressing against the edge of the desk.
“It’s not what you think,” he says.
I hold up the Polaroid. “You knew her.”
“I did,” Dane says. “I was living with my grandparents that summer. My parents thought it would do me some good. I was seventeen and a fuckup and needed to get away from them for a while. So I came here.”
“And met Petra. You’re the reason she snuck out at night.”
A nod from Dane. “We’d meet in the woods behind your house and mess around. It wasn’t anything serious. Just a summer fling.”
He’s moved farther into the room while talking, hoping I won’t notice. I do.
“If it wasn’t serious, why did you kill her?”
“I didn’t,” Dane says. “You have to believe me, Maggie.”
That’s not going to happen. Especially when I recall the way we’d found Petra. Dane pushing on the stained ceiling, testing it. Pushing and pushing until it gave way, which—I now suspect—was exactly what he wanted to happen. I think he knew Petra’s remains would be discovered at some point during the renovation and decided it would look better if he was the one to find them. That way all suspicion would shift to my father.
