Dedication
FOR MY BROTHER AND SISTER.
THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
Epigraph
There are mysteries within mystery, gods above gods.
We have our gods, they have theirs.
That’s what is called infinity.
—Jean Cocteau, The Infernal Machine
“That wasn’t any act of God.
That was an act of pure human fuckery.”
—from Stephen King’s The Stand
HAL-LORELEI-MADS
Map
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Francesca Zappia
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Copyright
About the Publisher
1
George Masrell’s house went up in flames at 2:59 a.m. on a frost-tipped October morning. Masrell was eighty, lived alone on the northeast side of town, and spent his days cleaning the bathrooms at Addamsville High. He was liked in the way outdoor art installations are liked: for his quirks and his reliable permanence.
His permanence ended while Addamsville slept. In an hour or two, news crews would arrive, suburbanites would wake for their morning routines, and stories would begin to form. How it happened. Why it happened. Whether or not Masrell would—or was already—haunting the ashes of his house or the hallways of the high school, because Addamsville was so obsessed with its ghosts it couldn’t even hold off for a couple of hours after an old man died.
I was the first one to know something had happened, because at 2:55 that morning, all the ghosts in town looked to the northeast, toward Masrell’s house. In the street and in yards, peering out windows and patrolling the sidewalks. They stopped. They turned. They stared. Mom had always told me to pay attention when the ghosts reacted, because they rarely reacted to things in our world but they always reacted to things in theirs. I paused in the driveway, skin crawling on the back of my neck.
Then I heard footsteps coming toward me, and a faint voice said, “Zora?”
It was 2:56 when I jumped inside a plastic garbage can to hide from my cousin.
I stifled my breath with the fraying hood of my sweatshirt so I could track her footsteps coming toward me. The can had wheels on one side and wasn’t designed to hold a hundred and sixty pounds of living human on a sloped driveway, so I had to shift on the damp bag of trash to keep the whole thing from tipping over. The smell stung my nose. Bootheels tapped lightly on the asphalt. She, like everyone else in town, couldn’t see our spectral neighbors and wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong.
“Zora?” Her whisper trailed through the cold darkness. I pressed my lips together to keep the swearing and the gagging inside. Trust her to be out at this time of the morning, doing her research. The footsteps moved around the can and stopped. The strap of her backpack rustled against her peacoat. “Zora? Are you—please don’t tell me you got in there.”
She would never hide in the trash, the elitist. She only hid in luxury cars and walk-in closets.
She sighed, paused, and then said somewhat reluctantly, “I’m on my period and my mom brought out the bathroom garbage today.”
I shot off the bag. The can tilted on its wheels, spun, and crashed down the driveway, spilling me out on the asphalt with a disgraceful squawk. The black trash bag tangled around my legs. I kicked it away, growling, as I got my bearings and scrambled to my feet.
“Gross!” I hissed at her. “So gross!”
Artemis put her hands on her hips and gave me her best look of disapproval. Her shiny blond hair was pulled back in a stick-straight ponytail, and her eyes looked like black pools in the automatic light above her garage. I glanced up at the towering Victorian—none of the lights had come on inside at the sound of the disturbance, thankfully, which meant my Aunt Greta was still asleep. The ghosts had disappeared from the driveway and the yard.
“Periods are not gross,” Artemis said. “They’re natural. And the waste has to go somewhere.”
“I have them, too, and I say they’re gross.”
“Why are you hiding in our garbage cans? You’re not rooting through our garbage, are you? If you need food or something, just ask, my mom isn’t as bad as you think—”
“Oh my god, how poor do you think I am?” I pulled my messenger bag back into place on my shoulder, swiped the trash water off the flap, and began backing down the driveway. I never felt grungier than when I was standing next to Artemis, and soaking in garbage did not help. “I don’t need to dig in your trash. And if you tell your mom I was here, I’ll cut all your hair off. I know where you sleep.”
She rolled her eyes and followed me. I walked faster. Artemis and her mother lived at the top of a hill on the southwest side, where they could oversee all parts of Addamsville: the town to the north, the woods to the west, the bluffs and the mines to the east, and Addams Lake to the south. This meant their twisting driveway, descending through the broad maples and oaks that dotted their front lawn, made my escape from Artemis more difficult than I would have liked. The ghosts had all trailed to the street, their forms shivering and disappearing into the shadows of houses and trees. Hiding from something I hadn’t seen yet.
“Why are you out so early in the morning?” Artemis asked, tailing me as I dipped onto the lawn and skirted around a particularly gnarly maple tree. “Why were you all the way up at my house? And where is your car? Are you hunting again? I’ve been trying to talk to you about that—I know what happened was awful, but this is so important, and if you’re back on the hunt, I can help you even better than before.”
I didn’t say anything. She could follow me for a while, at least as long as we were on the safe streets lit by warm wrought-iron lampposts, but once we hit the east side of town, her propriety would keep her from going any farther. We reached the sidewalk and I turned east.
“This is kind of creepy, Zora, you know that? What are you doing? If you’re hunting, you should have told me. You shouldn’t do it by yourself. People might think you’re stealing. You aren’t stealing, are you?”
My shoulders prickled. I’d been very careful about what hours of the morning I conducted my business. From two to four a.m., Addamsville was as silent as it would ever get, inhabited only by the dead, and since the weather had taken a turn, the hours and my freedom to roam unnoticed grew longer. If people caught me skulking around when it was dark, of course they would think I was doing something illegal—I was Zora Novak, after all, arsonist and delinquent.
“Zora, come on, I don’t want to call the police on you.”
I stopped, teeth clenched together, and turned. She stopped, too, and for the first time that night she met my stare with a look of trepidation. Besides our
height, the only similarity between us was our eyes, and I’d spent a lot of time learning how to make mine as terrifying as possible. Even when I tried to soften my expression, it didn’t always work. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. “I wasn’t going to break into your house. I wasn’t stealing from anyone. And I’m not hunting.”
Her chin turtled into her cashmere scarf. “Then what were you doing?”
“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you.”
“I might. I believe a lot of things, after all.” She held up the Moleskine notebook she’d been carrying under one arm. It was the notebook she always wrote in, the one that held all of Addamsville’s stories.
“Why are you out this early?” I asked. “Are you hunting alone?”
“Kind of. Not hunting, exactly, just researching. I wanted to check a few locations before the Dead Men Walking crew gets here tomorrow.” She checked her phone. “Well, today, I guess. I don’t know where they’re filming, and I wanted to make sure the hot spots were safe for them. It’s not going to do anyone any good if they run into a firestarter while they’re here. Now will you please tell me what you’re doing?”
I thought of not telling her. Going home to my sister and a shower and what little sleep I could get before school. Artemis wouldn’t call the cops on me, whether or not she knew why I was out here. She wasn’t a troublemaker, and she wasn’t one to report troublemakers, especially me. She kept her nose deep in her ghost research and minded her own business.
But I had no doubt she would tell her mother, and that was worse than her calling the cops.
“The mums by your front porch looked ratty,” I said.
“So?”
I sighed, undid the flap of my messenger bag, and turned it upside down. Flower trimmings scattered to the sidewalk along with a few crumpled geometry worksheets, an empty light bulb package, and a handful of pens. I picked up the pens, the worksheet, and the cardboard packaging and shoved them back into the bag.
Artemis’s eyebrows knotted in confusion. “You pruned our mums?”
“They looked ratty,” I repeated, glancing around. Almost all the ghosts were gone. “Will you leave me alone now?”
“But—why—” Then her expression lifted, and a manicured finger shot out to point at me. “It’s you! You’re the one who’s been going around fixing things for people and cleaning their yards and—”
“Keep it down!” I darted toward her, hoping to shut her up; my sudden movement seemed to do the trick. The old Victorian houses on her street were all far back from the road and hidden by trees, so at least there was no one around to hear us. “Don’t tell anyone! You’ll get me arrested.”
Artemis’s brows furrowed again. “Is this supposed to be some kind of repentance?” she asked, head cocked with a historian’s curiosity. “For what? You didn’t set the fires a year ago. And besides, people won’t forgive you if they don’t know you’re the one doing all the nice things for them.”
“I tried asking,” I said, “but surprise, nobody wants help from a Novak. Is that enough explanation for you? Go away.” I flicked my hand, peppering her with the garbage water, and started east again.
Bootsteps clopped up the sidewalk behind me.
“Zora, wait! The hunting—Addamsville needs more help than just pruned mums—”
I spun, the old anger bubbling in my throat. She didn’t understand how this worked, between her family and mine. She didn’t understand what hunting firestarters took from you. And she didn’t understand me.
The northeast sky stopped me. A pillar of smoke curled into the air, visible only because of the floodlights of the distant junkyard polluting the dark behind it. Artemis stopped, too, her hand inches from my arm.
“What is that?” she asked.
There was only one thing it could be. I had never set a fire that gave off that much smoke, but I’d seen it on television and in pictures. It spilled black and angry from the doors and windows of houses while their roofs caved in and their walls cracked. It was the fire of buildings being devoured. My heart skittered into the lowest reaches of my chest. The blistering heat. The deadly light. The stumps on my ring and pinkie fingers of my right hand ached under their prosthetics.
The wail of a fire truck started on the opposite side of town.
I took off. Away from Artemis, away from the wide-open spaces where I might be seen. Had I been thinking straight at the time, I might have turned to Artemis and calmly confirmed her as my alibi. I might not have immediately run away from her. I might have paid more attention to the ghosts, because for them all to disappear as they had meant there was something very wrong going on in their world. It meant there was a firestarter nearby.
But I never thought straight when it came to fire. Losing two fingers because of it will do that to you.
So I ran until I was alone, until I met the protective covering of the trees and hills of the east side, where the trailer park nestled quietly in the early morning. There were no dead here, though there should have been. They’d made themselves scarce. I hiked up the curving trail to the top of the bluffs to find the Novak trailer sitting dark and still. Artemis hadn’t followed.
The trees hid the town from here, but sirens still rang in my ears. They’d rattle in my head until six a.m., when I pretended to wake up and found my sister Sadie watching the news. Milk from her cereal spoon dripped unnoticed onto her thick afghan. The reporter standing before the blackened ruins of Masrell’s house detailed the two-and-a-half-hour struggle of the firefighters who extinguished the inferno and the unfortunate scene they’d found inside.
George Masrell was dead. The fire had burned too fast and too hot to have started accidentally. The police were now looking for an arsonist.
The people of Addamsville would know what this meant. Who had a record of setting fires? Who had shown disregard and even outright disdain for other locals in the past? Who might have had a slight beef with George Masrell because he yelled at her for dumping cold coffee in the school trash a couple of times?
I’d been the center of an Addamsville story before, but never like this.
2
Addamsville was a small town where everyone knew everyone, and everyone’s parents knew everyone else’s parents, and grandparents, and great grandparents, and all the way back to the founding of the town at the dawn of mankind. We were big enough for our own movie theater, a CVS pharmacy, and a dog park, otherwise known as the Happiest Place on Earth. There was a poor part of town and a rich part of town, and one part never let the other forget where it stood. If you had been here long enough, your last name was a status symbol. It was currency.
I was a Novak, and we paid in blood money.
Our trailer was the only one in town not in the trailer park. Sadie told me it was once, before I was born, but then Mom got tired of our neighbors and worked some magic to get it moved to the bluffs, where we could hide in the trees and on clear days look down at Addams Lake. When the town council tried to get Mom to move it back, they found Dad standing by the front door, leaning on his wood axe and chomping what looked like a lot of tobacco but was actually a cheek of Sour Apple Big League Chew, and Mom squatting on top of the trailer.
I like to imagine that was what frightened them off: Mom on the roof like an evil crow, dark hair damp with early spring mist, black eyes flashing in the gloom of the trees. Maybe they didn’t see her until she moved.
It was only a scare tactic, of course, but Mom was known around town as a weirdo anyway, so the story grew. She was a witch. She saw ghosts. No one really believed that, and she didn’t want them to, because it was true. I used to walk with her to Momo’s General Store at town center, where she’d explain the dead to me and buy me fresh-sliced Colby cheese to eat on the way home, and the owner, Maurice Moseley, looked at us like we’d crawled out of the sewers. There and back, passersby stared at Mom as we walked. There’s that Dasree Novak, they’d say. Get the children away before she steals their yo
uth.
Mom was already famous. The story of Mom and Aunt Greta, the Aberdeen girls, who disappeared in Black Creek Woods as children and returned months later unharmed and without memories, was one of the jewels in Addamsville’s crown of creepy tales. As an adult, Mom often wandered the town at night. Hunting, but no one knew that. She didn’t have friends. She only had us. When she went missing in the woods the second time, a lot of people said they felt terrible for us and hoped she came back safe, but I think they expected it out of her.
Dad was a little better. He didn’t see ghosts and no one thought he did, and while his marriage to Mom planted doubt in plenty of minds, his charm let him wiggle past it. Even if you started out on the wrong side of unsure about him, by the end of the conversation he’d have you handing over your wallet and keys for safekeeping. Despite the questionable reputations of the Novaks who had lived in Addamsville before us, most people considered Dad a pretty nice guy.
That was because no one realized he was also the slickest thief east of the Mississippi, and his fingers were stickier than flypaper in June. That got out a year after Mom’s second disappearance, when I was fifteen and he was sent to prison for an elaborate Ponzi scheme, and any tolerance or sympathy our family might have found burned up in the blazing inferno of town judgment.
So then you had me and Sadie. Sadie, five years older, had gone through high school as Sadie, Queen of the Undying and leader of the Birdies, the local gang of juvenile delinquents. She still had her favorite pair of combat boots, though they hadn’t seen the light of day in many a moon. Like Mom, Sadie scared most people who looked at her just by the soulless depths of her eyes, and unlike Dad, she owned a temper that could raze small buildings.
Now her hair was brown instead of black, and she kept it cut to her chin. She liked afghans, cheap drugstore reading glasses, and sweatpants that had words like TOUGH and FUN stenciled across the butt. She had never seen ghosts or firestarters, and Mom had never told her about them. She worked in Harrisburg, the larger town about thirty minutes to the northeast. People in Harrisburg didn’t care about the families of Addamsville, though Lazarus and Dasree Novak’s names came up occasionally, and Sadie had to deflect interest before someone made too many connections.
Now Entering Addamsville Page 1
