When Cilla disappeared back upstairs, Teddy sat back on his heels. He spoke in an awed tone. “Did you feel it at all?” She shook her head, speechless. “They flew right at you.”
Teddy turned the light off again, satisfying himself that their visitors had really left, and then turned it back on.
“You were dreaming. Twitching around, making noises. I looked at the TV, and when I looked back at you, I could see them.” He swallowed. “Hovering.”
She spoke. “I was having my nightmare.”
“It was the same light that comes from the house, Nat. The blue light? I could feel them looking at me. Thinking about me.”
“Me, too.” Like living things. “I think . . . I’ve seen them before. I saw a light in the bedroom window a few nights ago, a reflection. And sometimes, after I wake up, my eyes feel like I’ve been staring into the sun even though I just opened them.”
She rubbed her chest, feeling tenderness there.
“What the hell are they?” Teddy asked.
She didn’t have an answer.
CHAPTER 28
Another early-morning trip to the house, neither of them speaking much. It was the last place Natalie wanted to go. The only place she could.
#
Winter 1948
We go on here.
Edith put her hands over her ears, pushing forward, memorizing the circumference of the basement and all its obstacles. Broken mason jars, tipped chairs, piles of rotten cloth. She’d found an old canvas which she wrapped tightly around herself like a cloak.
She’d walked all night long as cold air filtered through the foundation. Her movements were the herky-jerky shuffle of a windup soldier, but still, she walked.
We go on here. The dead girl spoke in a cool, fathoms-deep voice. The words reverberated inside Edith’s head like two people speaking at once. You needn’t fight so hard.
“Be quiet.” On each circuit, Edith gave the dead girl a wider berth, but her gaze was inevitably drawn to her oyster eyes, the protruding row of her upper teeth. The girl’s feet had begun to curl inside her dancing shoes. “I’m not gonna die here.”
Dead Girl wouldn’t dignify that with a response. She let Edith try to walk out the hours. Had to be early morning by now. There was some light under the door. Edith had lived to see it because she was smarter, tougher. The dead one hadn’t even looked for anything to keep her warm, probably hadn’t checked for anything edible in those mason jars or felt the stone walls for trickles of ice to lick. She’d curled into a ball and surrendered.
Now look. The face that sank a thousand ships. Edith uttered a hoarse bray of laughter and continued tottering in her circle.
The corpse read her thoughts. We’re waiting to hold you, Edith. In time.
“Like hell.”
She slammed her toes against a chair without any sensation of pain, stumbled, and had difficulty getting back up. That this should be the final place she’d ever see, a frozen pit ripe with the scent of manure and rot, made her want to fly at the door again. Maybe if she kept moving. It was becoming much harder now.
#
Natalie returned to the present in the dining room, but horror drove her down the hall, past Teddy, who had been waiting on the back steps in the sunlight, trying to stay warm.
She dug in the weeds until she unearthed a stone. With a cry, she threw it at the house. A windowpane shattered.
She threw another one. It bounced off the clapboards. The next one managed to destroy what was left of the window at the southern end of the attic.
Teddy watched her as she finally staggered back, out of breath. Eventually, she gasped, “She’s going to die. She’ll freeze.” She shook her head, fighting back the images. She’d never be rid of them now.
Natalie walked toward the path, lost in pain and anger, until she realized Teddy wasn’t behind her anymore. She glanced back and saw him standing on the path, the wind ruffling his shaggy hair and wrinkled polo shirt. She knew what he was going to say.
“Can you feel them right now? The lights?” When she didn’t answer: “Do you think they’re always inside of you? Or do they come and go?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was thinking . . . maybe they are the dream.” He held her gaze. “Maybe they’re your link to this house. You felt it. Those things were alive. Maybe they’re pieces of the girls’ . . . energy . . . whatever you want to call it. Raisa, Irene, and Edith. Maybe you carry them with you.”
She tried to laugh but could produce only a choked, anguished sound.
“Nat. We need to go into the barn.” He held her gaze, almost in tears himself, shaking his head as she backed away. “You saw it in your dream. You told me. You went inside the barn basement that day and something happened to you. Something changed you.”
“No!”
“Yes! We’ve been looking for an explanation. This could be it.” His voice broke. “We’re running out of time. Two more days, and you’re gone.”
She shifted, glancing over at the barn, sagging on its foundation. Her voice shook: “Would it make any difference if I told you that I really, really don’t want to go in there?”
“Me neither.” He came over to her. “I’ll go with you. As far as they’ll let me.”
Together, they went to the basement door. The top hinge had corroded, and they had to drag it open across the weeds.
There were no skeletons, nothing like that. In fact, what they could see of the space was empty, the junk cleared out and hauled away by subsequent owners. Spiderwebs streamed from the dry-stacked stone walls. It wasn’t as dark down there as Natalie expected; holes in the rotten floor let daylight stream down from the collapsed roof.
They went in, where cold seemed to suck the air from their lungs, crystallizing into white clouds in the air. There was a faint creak, and a rustle, an exhausted old elephant of a building on the verge of final collapse.
The light came from Natalie as it always did, but this time, it was her own past that was waiting for her.
#
January, Two and a Half Years Ago
Fourteen-year-old Natalie Payson stepped onto the dirt floor of the basement. There was a cavernous feeling and a mineral odor, an inescapable chill. She may as well have been miles beneath the ground.
She looked back at the doorway of light behind her, listening. No footsteps crunching through the snow, no sound of Jason or the others closing in on her. She began to understand how much ground she had covered. The figures she’d imagined still chasing her through the woods had been phantoms. No one could find her here. No one could possibly know where she was.
Something whispered in the darkness. A voice, or a mouse scuttling across the dirt floor?
“Hello?” Natalie called.
The darkness seemed to hold its breath. When she turned back, the door was closing.
Panicking, she ran for it, throwing her hands out to stop it as it slammed with such force that it knocked her back.
“Hey!” She yanked the handle, crashing her head and shoulder against the seam of gray daylight. No give. She shrieked and battered her fists. “Let me out!” It couldn’t be Jason and the rest of them—they’d be laughing by now, teasing her.
She swiveled to face the blackness, gasping. Darkness ruled. More whispers, more hissing. Alone, yet not. Some primitive part of her understood now that she’d been baited here.
A bluish speck appeared in the far corner of the room. Several more became visible, flakes of light drifting out into the blackness of the room. For a moment, it looked like it was snowing in the basement.
Natalie’s hands went limply to her sides. She walked toward the lights, all resistance gone. The specks settled on her hair and skin and seemed to dissolve, gleaming dully beneath her flesh. She put her hand out and touched one of the falling specks. Even through her gloves, i
t felt like a splinter of ice.
Distantly, she became aware that her feet weren’t on the ground anymore. She hovered in the air, powerless to move, to speak.
Pain. She went rigid with it. Her brain impulses leaped and sizzled as the light washed through her, brutally plumbing her fourteen years’ worth of memories. Images flew before her mind’s eye—Mom, Dad, Cilla, and Teddy, her house, her school, moments of pain, joy—and then the intruders pushed further, beyond what Natalie had the power to know. Her body seized violently in midair. Spittle bubbled at her lips, hands clenching and opening.
When it was over, Natalie’s body dropped to the frozen floor.
She stirred slightly. Only three spots of light remained now, dancing in the air above her like fireflies. They whisked over her chest and sank.
Hours passed. Natalie awoke. A bar of fading winter light stretched across the floor from the now-open doorway. Outside, a bird twittered.
Natalie’s memory had been stripped. Go home, something inside her whispered, a new voice, a cold conscience. Go.
She crawled up the steps toward daylight. She’d bitten her tongue, and she was wet, cold. She’d wet her pants like a baby, and that confused and frightened her more than anything, sent her running through the yard toward the lane without looking back. She cried in a blank, lost way as she ran, but by the time she’d finally reached home, she was empty.
Night had fallen, and when she saw her mother’s bright kitchen through the windows, she headed for it, the memory of the barn basement and the walk home erased. She saw Teddy sitting at the kitchen table. She pushed through the door and her legs gave out, spilling her onto the floor.
#
CHAPTER 29
A bird twittered beyond the basement doorway.
Natalie emerged, breathing deeply of the fresh air. Teddy was just outside, waiting for her.
Shakily, he said, “Did you see it? What did they do to you that day?”
Natalie shook her head. She wanted to get on her bike. She wanted to pedal away from here and never look back. What good would it do, she thought numbly.
The house lives inside you. It is you and you are it.
“They looked inside me,” she said stiffly, remotely. “I don’t know what they saw. Something they liked.”
After a pause, Teddy said, “Or something they needed.”
That evening, Natalie found she couldn’t sit still and went outside, wandering around the yard. Teddy’s bedroom light was on, where he’d been since after supper, no doubt taking his frustrations out on his latest model. Or maybe hiding from her, avoiding the cloud of bad memories she seemed to wear like a shroud?
Natalie went over to the summerhouse and sat on the step. The bird hotel was gone; she and Teddy had pulled it out of the ground, hosed it off, and put it in the garage for the foreseeable future.
She glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and then touched her breastbone, roughly the area where the spirit lights had sunken into her. There should be something, shouldn’t there, some clue, heat, or sensation? What happened to them once they were inside her . . . did they dissolve, coursing through her bloodstream like specks of fool’s gold in a river? Bits of souls, carried inside her.
“Are you there?” She poked again, feeling ridiculous, and gave up.
Cilla appeared around the side of the house, her hands in the pockets of her jumper.
“Nice night.” She sat beside her on the step and gently bumped her shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, you know.”
Natalie laughed hollowly, looking at her. “What is?”
“Everything.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Experience.” Cilla folded her hands, and Natalie noticed for the first time how weathered they were, the skin creased from years of filling whatever role the Grill demanded, from prep cook to toilet scrubber. “Bad times feel like they’ll last forever. Then they pass, and you’re on to the next thing.”
Natalie tried to imagine this summer behind her, and couldn’t. She didn’t seem to have a future beyond the house anymore, or a past before it. It had insinuated itself into her life, trickling through the cracks in her memory. She didn’t realize her aunt was still speaking until she heard her say Peter’s name.
“What?”
“I said it’s crazy the way things turn out. Kids you’ve known since they were babies can grow up to be so lost, right here, in a place they’ve lived their whole lives.” Cilla shook her head. “I used to watch Peter after school sometimes, when he and Teddy were in kindergarten—do you remember that? Your grampie was still running the Grill then, and I was waitressing mornings, looking after Teddy in the afternoons, doing some babysitting. Peter came here for about a year or so.” Cilla gave a sad smile. “He and Teddy played together.”
Natalie looked at the hole in the ground by the summerhouse again.
“Did Teddy ever play the game with the bird hotel when Peter was here? You know, leaving secret messages inside, playing spy?”
“Probably. Birds have never wanted to nest in that thing. Maybe it’s too low to the ground.” Cilla swatted at a mosquito. “Anyway. Kids. They break your heart.”
“Is that why you’re so nice to Grace? Why you don’t bust her for coming into the Grill drunk?”
“I don’t see how calling the police on a sixteen-year-old girl who’s only hurting herself will do a bit of good. Everyone knows how she lives. Stays with one relative for a few months until she burns her bridges there, then off to the next one. Grace Thibodeau hasn’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of most of the time, and the only reason she clings on to that”—for a rare moment, Cilla’s disgust was evident—“Jason, is because she doesn’t believe she deserves any better.”
Elements of the story were so similar to Lowell’s that Natalie felt chilled.
“Do you think Jason was telling the truth when he said that the cops don’t have enough evidence to arrest him?”
“I think he was trying to scare you two. We were right to give Sergeant Ward a call about it. We’ll get a restraining order, make sure Jason can’t bother this family anymore.”
They were both quiet. In tandem, their gazes went to Teddy’s lit bedroom window. Natalie pictured him bent over his desk, trying to lose himself in the construction of an X-wing fighter or a ’68 Mustang, trying to forget all they’d seen.
“I know you kids have been through a lot,” Cilla said quietly, as if she’d read her mind, “but hon, you’ve lost that light in your eyes. I hardly recognize you without it. During all the trouble you and Teddy dealt with in middle school—the police, the hearing, the gossip—I never once saw you like this. Can’t you tell me what’s eating you?”
Natalie ducked her chin, afraid that if she looked at her aunt she might lose what little control she had left. She released a shaky sigh, listening to the crickets.
“Sometimes . . . I get the feeling that nothing ever really ends. Things come around and around again and we keep playing the same parts, doing the same things, hoping for a different turnout.” Her voice choked off. “But it’s impossible. You can’t change the ending.”
Cilla thought for a while. Her expression was solemn in the twilight.
“I’m sure it feels that way to you now. But your grampie had a saying that I try to remember when I’m scared and the world seems upside down. This, too, shall pass.” She kissed the top of Natalie’s head. “From what I’ve seen, it always does.”
CHAPTER 30
Natalie’s descent was slow. She flew, buffeting on cross breezes. Below, a house floated in a sea of field and forest. Her dream had come full circle.
She went down the corridor as snow sifted down from the ceiling, passing a moon-faced clock, a rack with a mirror. Swing music played softly from another room.
At the end of the corridor, the
kitchen doorway glowed. Natalie went inside.
China covered every surface. Plates and bowls, teacups and saucers, all brimming with snow. On a woodstove sat a kettle. The steam from the spout had crystallized into ice.
Natalie turned to face the door with six panes of glass. As she moved closer, she heard whispering. “Natalie,” the girls’ voices said. “Natalie.”
She opened the door.
They were out there, the trinity, suspended in the abyss with light streaming from them. What they were—their most elemental selves—could not be comprehended by the living, and Natalie screamed, and was ashamed.
“What do you want from me?” she managed to say.
Their energy blended and separated, impressions of Raisa, Irene, and Edith all palpable, sensed, not seen. Their voices grew guttural. “We wait for you.”
“Why?” As Natalie stared into the abyss, air stirred around her face and neck. Teasingly, at first, lifting strands of her hair. She knew what came next.
“We wait. We spin the wheel, we make the thread.” A ripple passed through them, maybe a laugh, maybe a sigh. “We wield the shears. We cut.”
“I don’t understand.” Pressure grew around her throat.
“Cheated, all of us.” Edith came through most strongly, with a crackle of ozone and rage like heat. “Almost your time now.”
“Almost time almost timealmostimealmost—”
“Teddy, wake up. Please wake up.”
Light filled the bedroom and Teddy stared at her from the cocoon of his blanket, his hair sticking out in corkscrews. It was two a.m. Rain spattered against the window.
Natalie stood there, her face colorless and pinched, arms folded tightly over her chest. She didn’t remember climbing the stairs to his room. She was crying too hard.
Teddy kicked off the sheets. “Downstairs. Before we wake up Mom.”
They went into the guest room and shut the door. Natalie dropped heavily onto the bed, hugging the pillow to her chest. It was a long time before she spoke.
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