by Nick Scorza
“The stories say, in the right light, the spirit’s shadow is visible with the man’s—that’s where the name comes from. It was a grand bargain: the spirits gave the Double Shadow extraordinary gifts—long life, strength, speed and beauty—and the Double Shadow paid them back with ‘tributes,’ like their poor mad captives. The spirits don’t eat normal food. Some of them feed on passion or joy, but most feed on fear and pain. Every suffering soul cast into their lake let them enter this world more fully, which also made the Two Shadows stronger.
“By the time the Iroquois came to the region, the Two Shadows had become decadent, better at torture than war. They still fought fiercely, but eventually the Iroquois Confederacy overwhelmed them. They never occupied the land, even though it was within their borders. They called the lake otkon okàra, the Spirit’s Eyes, and they had the good sense to stay well away from it.”
“What happened then?” I said. “The spirits had no hosts, and no . . . no food?”
“I don’t know any of this for certain,” my father said, “but according to the stories, the Two Shadows believed their victims would never find final rest. Maybe their lost souls, trapped in the lake, helped the spirits stay connected to this world. Still, they waited hungrily for hundreds of years. Then, around 1756, along comes a young Englishman named Broderick Redmarch, a deserter from the colonial regiments during the French and Indian War. He spent the war hiding from both armies by the lake. While he lived there, the—” It was hard for my father to say the words. Even here, he barely spoke above a whisper, “the King came to him.”
At the tree line, a flock of birds suddenly took to the air. My father turned to look. He didn’t relax when he saw it was just birds.
“It offered him whatever he desired, if he would let it enter the world more fully through him. It taught him rites that had gone unperformed for centuries, and it grew strong again. They were both colonists, in different ways, and both greedy for this land. It was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened.
“When the war ended in 1763, Redmarch made a fortune in the fur trade, even as beaver pelts grew scarce. None of the men he served with remained alive to report his cowardice—he probably took care of whoever the war didn’t. By the time the American Revolution broke out thirteen years later, he’d built enough wealth and connections to get commissioned a Captain in the Continental Army.”
I remembered the statue in the town square, and the cruel look in its eyes.
“The Revolution split the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy apart. Some tribes sided with the British, and some with the Americans. When we won, the colonists used this as an excuse to take their land by force, whether they supported the British or not. Broderick Redmarch led a number of ‘local militias’ that were infamous for their brutality. In return, all he asked for was title to land on a little lake with no river access and no edible fish, which the colonists were all too happy to give him. He married the unfortunate daughter of one of the settlers, and brought along two other families he was close with: his business partner, Wallace Clyburn, and his trusted lieutenant, Nathaniel Morris.”
I felt a queasy twist in my stomach, being reminded of our family’s connection to all this.
“We’re not like them, though. . . . Are we?” I asked. I knew the Morrises had done bad things, but it was suddenly very important for me to know we weren’t as bad as the Redmarches.
“We were one of the town’s founding families, which means we had a big role in stealing the surrounding lands from their rightful owners, and in other things that are harder to explain. It’s important to remember the sins of the past. We’re all complicit in things from long ago that echo into the present day. But we’re not exactly like them. Redmarch’s unholy bargain is passed down through his bloodline. Anyone with Redmarch blood is strong, beautiful, long-lived. Anyone who marries into that family withers away. Not by accident, either. The King still needs to eat. It’s become much more careful since it consumed and discarded the Two Shadows—only the King has a human host, and it will not share.”
“And Jonathan Redmarch is what, possessed?”
“I don’t know,” said my father. “Whatever it is, it’s not so simple as that. All I’ve managed to read on the subject is hints and conjecture. The Redmarch heirs change some time in adolescence. The-the king will take men or women, though it seems to favor the men, if only because powerful women draw more scrutiny from society. It acts through them, but they’re not puppets. It changes them somehow, brings out their worst qualities, and even when it moves on to their heirs, they’re still left twisted and wrong.”
I remembered Cordelia Redmarch and her serial killer son. I thought of everything Dad had told me about Jonathan’s family. This all sounded so crazy, sitting here on a picnic bench while my father talked about things that might have come from his conspiracy books. If not for what I saw with my own eyes last night, I would have laughed.
“I know how this sounds,” my father said. I guess it was pretty obvious what I was thinking. “I know it’s true, though. Jonathan was my best friend once. He was the kindest person I ever met, even though his father was a terror who beat him within an inch of his life more than once. When we were young, he promised me he’d never be like his father. He told me that I should kill him if he ever became like that.
“The woman he married, Anne, was my good friend, too. The two of them were high school sweethearts. Then Jonathan started to change. There was a darkness in him. He was different with Anne, cruel. I told him what was happening, what he was becoming, and he didn’t like it. He . . . he took me boating on the lake the day after I brought it up, acting like everything was normal, and he was back to being the Jonathan I’d grown up with. He took me out on the water, and he changed. There was this awful, cruel light in his eye. He threw me overboard. He was so strong, I couldn’t fight it, and I’d always been stronger than him. He still had his hands on me, and he was holding me underwater, trying to drown me. I fought with everything I had, but I couldn’t get free. He stopped just short of killing me. He heaved me back up into the boat to watch me cough and sputter like it was grade-A entertainment. And while I was catching my breath, coughing up lungfuls of that foul lake water, he leaned in close to me and said, ‘Don’t you ever question me or my affairs again.’”
“What happened then?” I said.
“I stopped seeing him, cut myself off. Not long after that, I moved to the city. Anne wasn’t so lucky. The two of them were already engaged. I begged her to leave him, but she didn’t. I think she was too afraid. He kept one promise, at least—I don’t think he ever raised a hand to her physically. The thing is, there are all kinds of ways to be cruel to a person without ever touching them. . . . I don’t know everything that happened between them, but Anne voluntarily committed herself at a treatment center years ago.”
I could see the regret etched in the lines of my father’s face. Mr. Redmarch seemed so calm, jovial even. I had trouble squaring my picture of him with what my father had just told me, even with everything I knew about the family. Then again, I’d always had the feeling that there was something more to him, like an iceberg whose mass was mostly below the surface.
We were quiet for a moment. I hoped the sun and the warm breeze would make me feel normal again, after everything I just heard, but it wasn’t working. How could any of this be real, and if it was, why would my father come back to it? Even after he and mom split, why return to a nightmare place like this? If I didn’t get an answer now, I probably never would.
“Dad, why did you leave the city and come back to this place?”
He was silent for a long time.
“I-I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know how it must have felt. I’ve asked myself the same question, and I don’t have a good answer.”
“Try,” I said.
“This place is in my blood. Ever since I moved away, I’ve felt it calling me back. I would dream I was back here, or find myself thinking about it every
day. After the divorce, it got worse. Once I even started to drive here in the morning without thinking.”
I remembered the odd pull I’d felt about this place, too, the sense I always had that I’d come here. I was a Morris, too, even if I was born in Jersey.
“So you had to come here?”
“I thought if I could just figure this place out, get my head straight, then I’d be able to come back to be near you. Believe me, it’s what I want.”
I thought of my father’s book—his attempt to make sense of this place that refused to make sense. I had been so mad at him, and part of me still was, but now I thought I understood. After all, I still felt that same need to understand this place, and not let it overwhelm me. I got up and gave him a hug. I felt the sun and the breeze and his arms around me and for one moment, it felt just like I was a kid again, before all the hurt.
“There’s more,” he said, a nervous edge in his voice. “I didn’t have a good childhood here. My father wasn’t as bad as Jonathan’s, more of a garden-variety abusive drunk, but we have a history of that in the family, and worse, especially when connected with the Redmarches. They have a way of bringing out the worst in everyone around them. I was . . . I was really afraid I’d turn out like my dad.”
I’d never met my grandfather on Dad’s side. He died when Zoe and I were still little. I couldn’t remember, but I don’t think my dad even came back for the funeral. My father was always so gentle, I couldn’t imagine him hurting me or Mom, but I hadn’t known what he grew up with until now.
We took a walk through the fields while I tried to sort out everything my father had said. We passed through rows of apple trees, their apples just hard little green lumps this early in the year. My phone buzzed and I saw it was a voicemail from Lady Daphne, telling me not to worry about staying home, and to be sure to let her know if I was still feeling bad tomorrow. Good thing she hadn’t used her clairvoyance on me.
As we walked, I found myself gazing nervously at the forest every so often. I didn’t see anything weird, but it wouldn’t be long before I was always checking behind my back like a paranoid local. I tried to think of how Zoe fit in to all of this. Why had I seen her in the lake? The figure I’d glimpsed sometimes in the distance, or at the café window in the early morning, had looked like her, too. Had her soul somehow migrated here, lost and trapped in that horrible lake? Or were the spirits lying to me, using my sister’s face and our language, trying to tempt or trick me? Either possibility felt too frightening to bear, but I knew I’d have to keep looking until I found the truth.
I couldn’t put any of this into words yet, but one other thing was bothering me.
“Dad, if talking about this is so dangerous, why are you writing that book?”
I understood now why he kept it hidden away, afraid to show anyone, and why he refused to talk about it even with me. I understood his need to make sense of this place, and to free himself from it, but why do it if it was such a big risk?
“They don’t like to be exposed, or talked about—that’s why they’re so sensitive about names. The book is . . . well, I hoped it would free me of this place once and for all, and if I couldn’t free myself, maybe exposing this place, telling the truth, would free us all somehow.”
He didn’t sound convinced. In fact, he sounded terrified of the very idea of going public, but I could see how badly he wanted to be free of this town.
My sleepless night was starting to catch up with me again, though I was amazed I could even think of sleeping after learning what I’d just learned. We shared some homemade fudge, then headed back to the car.
I had been so angry at my father since the divorce—angrier than I’d admitted even to myself. It had felt like being abandoned all over again after losing Zoe. It was like a muscle I’d been clenching all this time, and now, slowly, it was beginning to release. I don’t think I could have grasped what my father was going through until I came here myself, and I was glad I did, ghosts and spirits be damned.
“Thanks for breakfast, Dad,” I said as I sank into the passenger seat.
I thought I would pass out the moment I lay back in the seat, but my mind was racing with thoughts of family curses and evil spirits and all the brutal history of this place. I kept coming back to Zoe, staring back at me from that horrible lake. Zoe who needed my help. I had learned so much in the past few hours. Maybe now my father would finally help me make sense of it all.
“Dad, I saw Zoe.”
My father gave me a shocked look as he drove.
“I know you don’t believe me about the notes, but I saw her. I’ve seen her in the distance, and at the café window early in the morning. She looks like she wants to come to me, but she can’t. Something’s holding her back. Then, when we found Danny in the lake, I-I saw her there. My reflection wasn’t me, you understand, it was her looking back at me. I can’t explain it, and it’s tearing me up inside.”
My father turned to look at me, and I was stunned to see the anguish in his face. He wiped away a tear as he swung his gaze back to the road in time to keep from drifting into the shoulder. When he finally spoke, his voice was thick with sadness and with fear.
“Clara, there’s something else I have to tell you.”
XVI.
As he drove, my father bit his lip, searching for the right words. He was biting so hard, I was afraid he’d start bleeding.
“Tell me,” I said.
He looked at me, and there was such worry in his face that I started to feel afraid myself. But it was different than his panic when I named the King of the Wood out loud. This was a slow, creeping dread, as if something he’d feared for a long time were finally coming true. I was silently freaking out as I waited for him to speak.
“There’s something we should have told you a long time ago. We wanted to tell you, but we were afraid it’d do more harm than good. Your mother . . . your mother wanted to. She was always stronger than me. Oh, Clara, honey, I hope you can forgive us. You see, you never had a twin sister.”
He whispered the words at first. I couldn’t believe I heard them right.
“What?”
“You never had a twin sister,” he said louder. “Zoe . . . Zoe wasn’t real.”
I looked into his eyes, expecting some sort of sick joke, or at least an explanation, but he was deeply, sadly serious. What the hell was he trying to tell me, that I was delusional? That I’d hallucinated a twin sister, only to hallucinate that she died?
“Why would you say something like that? It makes no sense.”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. We should have done things differently. . . . There’s so much I should have done differently.”
As we drove, I looked out into the blue-green shadows between the trees, dark even in daylight. I wished I was there, alone with whatever lurked in the woods around Redmarch Lake, rather than right here listening to this. Slowly, painfully, my father tried to explain.
“You told us about Zoe almost as soon as you could form sentences. We thought she was your imaginary friend. You would tell us all these stories about the two of you and all the adventures you had. It’s not uncommon to want a twin.”
This sounded like so much nonsense to me. All of the memories I had, good or bad, Zoe was there. Every night when we went to sleep, every day out with our parents, or at school. We had been inseparable.
“We went along with it at first, but as time went on, we started to worry. You wouldn’t talk to other children, you spent all your time with Zoe. We-we took you to therapy, we even tried medication. It wasn’t working. They wanted to take you out of school—they said you scared the other children. The therapists said it would only get worse as you got older. We were afraid if it went on too long, you’d completely disassociate from real life, and we’d have to put you in-in an institution somewhere. We had no idea what to do. . . . We just wanted our daughter to have a normal life. We took that vacation because we prayed a change of scenery might help. We were ready to try anything.”
I sat there, numb. I remembered spending long hours with a rotating cast of doctors and therapists. I thought it was all after losing Zoe, but I couldn’t be sure. So much of my life from those years was a blur. I remembered mornings as a little girl, my parents getting me my vitamins—were they giving me drugs? I remembered my mother reading hospital pamphlets with tears in her eyes.
“Then the accident happened,” my father went on. “I’ll never forgive myself for that day. I don’t know how I let you out of my sight. When I heard the lifeguard’s whistle, I came running, but they held me back at shore, saying I’d only make things worse.
“They pulled you out of the ocean, beat the water out of your lungs, but you kept insisting that they go back for Zoe. You kept telling us that Zoe drowned. The lifeguard was panicked, saying he only saw you out there, no one else. We had to tell him Zoe wasn’t real.”
This was too much to bear. All of the pain and stress and confusion I’d felt since I’d come here was crashing down on me in one giant wave, and I felt like I was drowning all over again, sitting in that passenger seat. Only the speed of the car stopped me from opening the door and running away.
“Zoe saved my life,” I said. “I-I was the one who started drowning, she saved me, pulled me up so I could breathe, until a wave knocked us apart. Of course she’s real.”
“You were in so much pain after. We wanted to tell you that you didn’t have to be, but we were too afraid of how you’d take it,” my father said. “You weren’t speaking, or listening. You barely ate. We took you to therapist after therapist. We pulled you out of school. We were afraid we would have to go through with committing you to a mental health facility.”
“I had just lost my twin,” I said. “I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. All of that time is a blur for me.”
My father looked at me, tears in his eyes.
“Finally, a new therapist we took you to mentioned something called Vanishing Twin Syndrome. She said we should speak to the doctor who delivered you. Sure enough, the doctor told us that in the early stages of your mother’s pregnancy, there had been twins in her womb, but one of them didn’t make it. He said when this happens, they don’t tell the family because they don’t want them to be traumatized—and they especially don’t want the surviving twin to know. We didn’t think it could have anything to do with Zoe, but the therapist thought the imaginary sister, and her imaginary death, were all your way of coping with this first subconscious loss, compounded by the trauma of almost drowning.