by Micol Ostow
I WATCHED FROM THE WINDOW OF THE SEWING ROOM as Ro’s car sputtered back down our driveway. We didn’t have a chance to say any kind of private good-bye.
I DREAMED OF LUKE THAT NIGHT.
The hands on my bedside clock turn over, pointing, accusing, to 3:14. Luke stands over me, cheekbones streaked with war paint, eyes glowing, body bathed in moonlight. He holds a mirror to my face.
In the dream, my reflection plays back to me: red-rimmed eyes, slit pupils, lips curled in a menacing snarl.
In the dream, I see myself as Luke sees me:
(insane)
(crazy)
Monstrous.
In the dream, I am monstrous.
But Luke?
Luke is a demon.
And he means to destroy me.
From the corner of the bedroom, Aunt Ro whispers.
Remember, she says, what it is that you can do.
Remember.
Soon.
Or run.
In the dream she disappears, dissolves into thin air. I am left alone, wrapped only in a bedsheet, as in her wake, Luke looms.
He raises the shotgun to eye level.
He is tall,
taller,
tallest.
He says:
“Sorry, sis.”
TEN YEARS EARLIER
DAY 24
JULES COMES TO ME every night. At 3:14, she’s there.
She says: It’s time.
The shotgun rests, cold and still against my leg.
I tap at it, eager.
Yeah, I think. It’s time.
DAY 28
(ALWAYS)
12:08
Jules sees the light on in my bedroom, peeks her head in. “Sleeping up here tonight?”
Her tone reminds me that this is unusual these days. My behavior’s been unusual, I mean.
More unusual these days.
I smile at her. “Lots to do tonight.” Under the covers, I wrap a hand around the butt of the shotgun.
She screws her face up. She looks puzzled, like she doesn’t remember about our plans, all the stuff we talked about. But that doesn’t bother me.
12:43
After tossing and turning for over an hour, I pad downstairs, ignoring the creeping sensation of being watched that permeates the air. I pour myself a glass of lukewarm water from the kitchen tap, avoiding reflective surfaces for fear of what they may reveal.
As I move back toward the hallway, the cellar door opens, and Luke bursts through.
His hair is askew, his eyes are bloodshot.
He looks at me, but doesn’t seem to register. He pushes past me, determined.
I ask, “Where are you going?”
I wonder, Now?
He doesn’t reply as he storms toward the door, down to the boathouse.
1:23
No chance of sleep. Not with Dad’s snoring echoing down the hall, his breathing thick and muddy.
Not with knowing this’ll be the last night that I ever hear that sound.
2:36
I realize tonight is the first night I can’t hear the banging of the boathouse door, despite Luke’s silhouette casting long, mutant shadows through the knots in the weathered wood.
It isn’t a comforting thought.
2:42
Mom, Abel, and Dad are sleeping the sleep of the dead, thanks to some pills mixed into the water pitcher at dinner.
Mom really should keep her meds locked up.
With her and Abel out of the way, there’s no reason that this—that tonight—shouldn’t work.
2:58
Luke is planning something out in the boathouse. Plotting. With Amity.
Luke is not in his right mind tonight. And I may never have been, may never have had a right mind.
He keeps things in the boathouse. That was what Ro thought. And the ax has been missing from the woodpile for quite some time now.
3:04
Lightning bursts across the sky, and thunder claps like a gunshot. All month now the storm’s been waiting, gathering strength. Building up to this moment.
Out the window, those wild, red eyes are back. They narrow at me.
I nod back. I understand. Yeah. Now.
3:06
The sky is marbled with clouds and the air feels heavy, thick. Charged.
I think that it is going to rain.
No.
I think that it is going to storm.
3:11
Jules taps me on the shoulder. She’s just an outline, like, buzzing in and out. I reach out to touch her and kick something cold and stiff.
The shotgun, barrels oiled and gleaming.
3:12
There is a tap on my shoulder. A breath against my ear.
A whisper:
“You have to leave, Gwen.
“You have to find a way to stop this.
“Or else—
“You have to leave.”
The voice is Annie’s. But when I turn to face her, to ask her to explain, the kitchen is empty.
No Annie. No Ro. No parents.
Luke is still outside.
And the rain still falls.
3:13
I don’t remember leaving my room.
But suddenly, I’m in the upstairs hallway, floorboards popping under my feet. The sound, the twisting and wrenching … the snarls and growls of the house … they’re not human.
Amity’s inhuman. More than human. And she’s inside of me.
I’m inhuman right now, too.
I make my way down the hall in the direction of our parents’ bedroom, slowly, soothed by the sound of heavy, hard rain.
At their door, I wait for a minute.
My finger twitches on the trigger. Then I feel breathing on the back of my neck.
I turn and there’s Jules. The real Jules. She’s wide-eyed, scared-looking.
“What’s going on, Connor?” she asks, her voice choked. “What are you doing?”
She looks down, sees the gun, and her chest starts to rise, all fast and frantic. “What the hell is that?”
Her voice is shrill. My face turns inside out, like my thoughts.
I say, “What do you mean?”
I press my palm into the butt of the gun, firm. “I’m doing what you told me to do. What you asked me to do. What we talked about.”
She shakes her head, face white.
“Connor,” she gasps. “We never talked about this. I would never ask you for this.”
She looks dizzy. And suddenly I feel drugged, confused. Woozy.
I step closer to her. I raise the gun.
“We planned this,” I insist. “It was your idea.”
Jules grabs.
“Connor,” she says, “this would never be my idea.”
She swallows. Her fear is the sound of sandpaper, or dust.
“Connor,” she says, “what are you thinking?”
But my sister, my twin … she knows.
What I’m thinking is exactly what she’s always feared.
3:14
I hear a clicking sound, a particularly loud crash of thunder. A jagged streak of lightning forks across the sky.
She was shot in the head, I know, at precisely this moment.
Now.
She was shot in the head.
The boathouse door bangs open, then closed again, mute against the raging of the storm.
Luke is out there, Annie says. With the ax.
She was shot in the head, I agree.
And we’re next.
3:14
Jules lunges for the shotgun but I pull back, on instinct. Outside, the storm explodes.
I close my eyes and feel thunder blast straight through my body.
When I open them again, Jules is gone.
No, not gone.
Dead.
Jules is dead, her eyes empty, rolled back in her head, her mouth pinched up. Blood runs down her shoulders, pooling around her on the floor.
I’m covered in Amity, weari
ng her like a second skin, feeling her movements when I breathe.
Knowing: Amity is at peace.
3:21
It is Annie who tells me it is time to get out.
She’s back again, flickering translucent in the dim light of the kitchen.
“Run,” she says, her voice a hoarse whisper. “Now.”
She seems to have an idea that this will be my only chance. That this moment is the end.
“I can’t,” I say.
Overhead, the light buzzes a dull, dying fluorescent hue, coating the room in a pale, jaundiced shade. In that buttery static, Annie mutates like a shadow puppet, shifting and humming in and out of frequency. In this instant, it is easy to believe that she isn’t real. That none of this is.
Then she extends an arm.
“Gwen,” she says, and now her voice is the sound of chains dragged against asphalt—“you have to go.”
Her fingers are greasy and cold against my palm, and as our skin makes contact, a blinding flash triggers in my mind. A bloody tableau is revealed.
(She was shot in the head.)
A limp, lifeless figure, glassy eyes rolled back to the whites, blood lacing the tangles of her shoulder-length curls. A trail of gore leaking back, peaking toward a far bedroom on Amity’s second floor.
The walls of the kitchen curl inward, and the cellar door creaks open.
There is a pop, a burst, as the room dives into inky darkness, and then back to the hazy, newspaper-yellowed tint of moments ago. I bite back the urge to shriek, to peel my own skin from my bones.
What if?
What if this were only a bad dream? What if Annie, if Amity—what if none of that were real?
What if Luke weren’t, just now, down in the boathouse, digging? Considering things like axes, shotguns, silencers, the speed at which sound should carry across the surface of the water?
What if there were no red room? No sacred history, or stale, stained soil?
What if I really were crazy?
What if, what if, what—
if?
I hear a scream.
I race outside.
The storm is here.
3:40
I tear downhill, toward the boathouse, feet slipping, kicking up thick clumps of mud. I stumble, and slide down the last few paces angled on one hip, stray stones and twigs poking at me, scraping and rending my flesh as I skid along.
I slam to a halt just before the boathouse, palms raw and ankles, knees, and shins torn bloody. Wincing, I press up just enough on my forearms and rise. Push wet straggles of hair out of my eyes, blink through the torrents of rainfall.
Focus.
Before me, on the ground. Drowned in overflow from the rainfall, but dead long earlier. Head rotated fully, twisted unnaturally so that his gaze falls directly over his shoulder, directly behind him. Ax protruding from his belly, staining it sunset-whorls of reddish pink.
Murray.
I choke back a sob. Murray.
Luke.
I pull the door to the boathouse open and step inside.
3:45
Stop screaming! I think, my mother’s words to Ro.
But I’m the one who’s screaming now. And I can’t seem to stop.
The boathouse floor is gone; every last rotted baseboard has been pried up, the ground turned over, raked, and razed.
Before me lies a cluster of bones.
The skeletal figure is barely larger than my own frame, and though her flesh has decayed, her clothing hangs in blood-streaked tatters. Thinning wisps of auburn curls splay out, curtains flanking a shattered skull, a fiery ring around a bull’s-eye gunshot wound.
Beside her, the ragged, stained stuffed animal lies, the one I found on the road, in the woods. I reach to pick it up, fingering the pilled, worn fabric, drawing back from the fresh bloodstains that transfer to my fingertips.
I squint, rub my eyes.
Beneath the animal, there is a book.
Luke’s book. Amity’s book. The scrapbook of her history.
I pick it up, peel open the front cover, warped, more discolored than I remember. I flip, flip, flip, to the back of the book, to that one article.
FAMILY SLAUGHTERED AT AMITY.
Names. I scan them quickly, frantic.
Julianne Webb.
“Annie?”
I glance up, and she is there, particles of light shimmering through the drops of rain that sluice down her shoulders.
Jules, now. She shrugs. Jules, always. To him.
I think, She was shot in the head.
Annie—Jules—points to her figure, a heap of bones beneath the surface of Amity, another blood sacrifice.
It was an accident, she says. He buried me.
And then he killed the rest of them.
Annie meets my eyes, sure and strong in the moment. I tried to help you. Jules … she’s angry. The way she—we—died, she can’t help anyone. But I tried.
She glances toward the door as it swings open one last time. It trembles, shudders on its hinges, then rips savagely off its frame, and is carried away. Through the mouth of the crumbling doorway, we can just make out Luke’s figure, staggering up the slope of the hill, ax in hand.
Staggering toward Amity.
Annie says one last thing:
It’s happening again.
This is where it always ends, Gwen.
And with another clap of thunder, she’s gone.
3:49
Thunder blasts the horizon. Swollen purple bruises cloud the sky, rolling, gathering force. Hard rain drives down, and lightning slices relentlessly at the air. I race toward Amity, toward Luke and his ax. Through sheets of rain, he screams at me, howls, contorts.
He swings the ax and misses, the blade whistling past my ear, so close I can almost feel the parting of the breeze. I lunge, lose my footing. We roll back, down the sloping hill again, toward the water’s edge.
Luke plunges, is submerged. And as I peer through the frothing sheen of the Concord River, the face I see beneath is not my brother’s. Mud slicks his features and his eyes glow, otherworldly, laced with red.
The face I see beneath is not human at all.
I remember:
The stones. I made the stones fall.
It wasn’t something I tried to remember, but I couldn’t forget it, either.
Maybe the memory would save my life.
My brother’s face is not human at all. He’s more than human.
But remembering the stones, I think:
So am I.
3:51
A current gathers from within, warming me, winding its way to my throat.
Luke emerges from the water, sputtering.
Ax in hand, he charges for the house, barreling past me and up the hill.
He is fast, almost there. But in my own way now, I am faster.
Those charged particles, that white noise, it fills me, churns the marrow in my bones.
This is where it always ends, too.
I open my mouth to scream.
Instead, I erupt.
My rage bubbles like a volcano, primitive and filled with fury. A streak of lightning, white-hot and nuclear, splits the house in two. I shriek, flames lapping at my insides, consuming my spine as the house—as Amity—is devoured.
The storm funnels out, away from the house, making space for this blazing inferno I have summoned. In the smoke, symbols, signals are revealed: the thrashing tail of a prehistoric creature, the slit pupils of a demon. A skittering, skeletal human frame.
A whistling sounds and Amity’s eyes—those winking, half-moon sewing room windows—they blast and shatter, fragments of glass raining sharp and deadly in a frenzied arc. Some shards graze my shoulders, my cheeks, but I don’t bother to shield myself from the blows.
I want to see this. I need to see this.
A small, invisible hand circles my wrist. Annie. She is silent but with me still.
Together, we watch Amity burn.
NOW
Dear Jules:
They brought a new girl in today. Someone we both know.
Gwendolyn Hall. The one whose family was living in Amity, the one I mentioned in my last letter.
She’s like us, I think.
Or. Well. Kind of like me. Even though there aren’t that many people really like me, you know?
But anyway. I told you how they only lasted twenty-eight days, right? Just like us.
Just like everyone Amity gets her claws into.
After ten years in this place—on my best behavior, mostly—the guards are pretty good to me. I get to hear some stories, sometimes. They told me about Gwen right away, right when she first got here, this morning. “Criminally insane,” like me—obviously, or she wouldn’t be here to begin with. Everyone got a kick out of the fact that she had a history with Amity. Like me. They thought it was pretty weird, one of those coincidences.
Just a wild coincidence, all the freaky things that happen around Amity.
I don’t bother with the truth: that there’s no such thing as coincidence when it comes to Amity. The truth wouldn’t get me out of here any sooner. Assuming I’m ever going to get out of here at all, which, you know, I probably won’t.
Who would even believe the truth anyway?
She burned the house down, can you believe it? If you told me that was even possible, that Amity was like … vulnerable, I guess, that way, I would’ve laughed. But she burned the house down. The parents and brother managed to escape, rowed to the nearest neighbors in Dad’s leaky old Leeward. Their car wouldn’t start so the boat was the only choice. So there’s one thing Dad did right, once in his whole miserable life.
The house is gone.
But that doesn’t mean Amity is … over.
