by Cara Martin
In complete darkness, every particle is a potential threat. Patches of black fuse with other patches, forming phantom shapes in the void. Something thuds. Creaks. Fingers as weightless as feathers tousle my hair. I duck, my hands out in front of me, feeling my way forward.
“You still there, Misha?” Tanvi asks, her voice like a star, a light to guide to me.
“Still here.” And so is Josephine. Her breath cold on my neck.
The window blind snaps up, frail light altering the room but not taming it. The fuzzy edges of furniture come into view, hostile and time-worn. Tanvi stands in front of the window, hair wild like a raging waterfall and body bent at the middle, hands fastened to the bottom of the window, struggling to yank it open.
I weave around the bed to help her. Something jerks at both my feet. Flips them off the floor and drags me backwards in a rush of motion. Flings me frantically against the far wall. My shoulders and head thwack against the wall, the sound triggering a familiar dread. He’s shit-faced drunk again and my mom will pay the price for it.
Only this time it isn’t him. Isn’t her, either. I’m Shantallow and Josephine’s punching bag, and it never tires, never sleeps.
Tanvi tears toward me, flying past the bed.
“Stay back!” I warn, locking my hands around the back of my head and pressing my spine into the wall. Shielding myself as much as I can. “The window — just get the window open. We have to get out. The girl who lived here was insane — she killed her family.”
Tanvi doesn’t ask me how I know. Her head tilts on her shoulders as she stares at me. Then she runs. Bounds back to the window with her arms out in front of her. Something stops her short before she can reach it. Pushes her hard. She drops to her knees. Crawls in the direction of the light like a crab scuttling for water.
I do the same.
Pressure sledgehammers my back. Crunches me into the floor.
Glass shatters, the sound sharp and delicate. Grainy fragments rain down on my hair and the back of my neck. I shuffle forward, shards slicing my palms. Standing quickly, my eyes shoot to Tanvi at the window, an upended bedside table on the floor in front of her.
“Come on, come on,” she urges, sliding her body halfway through the window, dangling precariously over the sharp fragments of glass that cling to the bottom of the pane. “I can see Cal and Lauren out there. Running for the woods. Someone’s chasing them.”
Stretching my arms out in front of me I sprint for the window, calf muscles firing like they’re powered by nitro. Something kicks my right knee out from under me. The floor swoops up to meet me, flattening my chin with a whack, pummeling my kneecaps. The pain screeches through my nerve endings, begging me to quit moving and give in. Anything to make this stop.
“Get up!” Tanvi shouts from the other side of the open window, her feet planted on the sloping porch roof.
My legs won’t move. Tears form in the corners of my eyes. Or maybe it’s blood. But she’s waiting. Get up get up get up, I tell myself. Don’t make her say it again.
Only when I manage to force myself to my feet it’s the worst kind of déjà vu — the one you knew was coming but couldn’t stop because there’s no other way. My knee buckles under the force of a new strike. First one kneecap, then the other. I stare ahead as I start to plummet. Spy Tanvi plunge her arm through the window and reach for me. My feet skip forward on air, searching for traction where there isn’t any. Then my hand snaps out to meet hers.
The gap between our fingers widens into an abyss as I go down. Grunt like an animal as I fall. My battered body cringing under the hurt. Too much to take.
Tanvi kneels on the porch roof, her head hanging through the bedroom window, her voice urging me on. “Misha!” Her arms lunge into the dark room with me — ladders to another world. Pushing myself to my knees, I crawl, glass piercing my palms. My kneecaps groan underneath me, my mind willing them to hurry.
If I get up, it will only happen again. Even on my knees I feel Josephine at my heels, ready to knock me sideways.
“Misha,” Tanvi repeats, her voice softening under the weight of something I don’t understand. “Now. Run to me.”
Behind me, the air is strangely light. Not wholly under the spell of Earth’s gravity. As I stand and break into a sprint, it propels me forward. One of my legs charges through the open window, the sole of my shoe landing firmly on the porch roof. Over my shoulder, something luminous blazes from inside the bedroom. Hazy and burnished coppery gold like the setting sun. I turn to look as I tug the rest of my body to safety, eyes squinting against the blurred glimmer of two forms, their frames united in a dual task. Somehow holding Josephine off and hastening me outside.
My eyes skim to Tanvi’s. The awe in her face amplifies my giddiness into euphoria. But there’s no time to linger. She turns to scramble down the sloping roof. Lowering ourselves off its shortest point, we hang on by our fingers for only a moment. Then release.
Landing in the damp grass at the front of the porch, I grimace. I need a triple dose of tramadol. A stretcher and someone to carry it. Everything hurts in a way my brain can’t contain, the pain bleeding into every thought and even the smallest actions. But Tanvi’s no better off than I am. And I’m not going to the house to get more pills.
Tanvi’s already begun to jog, unevenly and slowly like an old woman weighed down by severe arthritis. “Come on,” she calls, listing to one side as we descend into the forest. “We need to catch up to them.”
Narrowing the distance between us, I glance at her sideways, Tanvi’s expression invisible in the dark. “They had the lantern, but I can’t see any sign of them,” she says, thick, disheveled strands of her hair clumping together to wall her from her view even if the moon should miraculously break through the clouds and train its spotlight in our direction. “No light anywhere.”
The tree canopy is too thick. I can barely make out my own hands. Rain-sodden leaves splash droplets of water on our shoulders and heads as we pass under them. Tanvi’s pace slackens, her footing on the forest floor precarious. I fall into line behind her, the gap between trees narrowing. We’ll never catch up to Cal and Lauren like this, but neither of us is capable of moving any faster. The trees themselves could practically beat us in a race.
“My knee.” Tanvi winces, stopping to massage it with her palm.
Mine’s busted up too. The right worse than the left. But her injury seems more acute, by the look of her gait. Doesn’t want to take weight. A meniscus tear or ligament injury, maybe.
“You should go find them,” she advises in the same tone that a newscaster would announce tomorrow’s weather. “I’m too slow.”
“Don’t be stupid — I’m not leaving you here.”
“There was someone trailing behind them,” she argues stubbornly. “I think it was John — what if he catches up to them? We don’t know what he’ll do.”
“I don’t care. You really think I’m going to abandon you in this forest when you can hardly walk?”
She doesn’t reply, only peers fixedly at me in the blackest night I’ve ever seen, warm bitterness clinging to her body like a wet blanket. It heats the air between us, charring it into acrid resentment.
“I’m sorry — I know you’re worried about your cousin,” I add. “But I can’t. Cal is with her. He’ll take care of her.”
“Unless something happens to him.” She reaches for her knee a second time, gingerly working it over with her fingertips. “I saw something back there in the room for a second. Your dad. Not distinctly, but that was him, wasn’t it?”
I clear my throat as she turns to stumble onward. “Yeah. With Alice. I saw her a bit too.” The vivid, blushing light emanating from them both. “Before tonight I didn’t know he was dead. It seems so obvious now. Someone who knew about his money probably took him out years ago.” Or just some dangerous asshole he bounced the wrong kind of look at. He neve
r knew what was good for him. Didn’t know when to stop.
“I’m sorry,” Tanvi offers uncertainly — maybe because until now I’ve only ever had shitty things to say about my father.
I bob my head. “It must have been him sending the nightmares all along, trying to warn us away from this place.”
A noise midway between a grunt and chuckle of exhaustion bubbles from Tanvi’s throat. “That didn’t exactly work.”
“No.” Only made me exponentially more curious when I saw her on the Ghims’ lawn that very first time. But if I didn’t know it before tonight, I know it now without question — I would’ve fallen for Tanvi without the dreams. Not an act of fate, exactly, because in fate you don’t choose. But wherever, whenever I saw her, something inside me was always going to inch forward, breathless and dizzy, and lean toward her, hoping she’d lean back.
All the dreams did was set me on a path I would’ve stumbled upon myself eventually.
“When the time comes, don’t let the darkness inside you,” Tanvi declares, her voice porous, like I can hear the wind rustling through the syllables. We’re so spent and shattered that it’s a wonder we can talk at all. “Do you remember — it’s what Alice told me that night on the phone. Like she could see this coming down the road.”
“I remember.” My nose aches like it’s been bulldozed by a demolition team. The barbed wire puzzle pieces inside my chest slash at me sideways, readjusting themselves under my skin. “From where they are, there must be things they can see that we can’t.” Possibilities, likelihoods. Mortal danger.
“Do you think they’re still here?” she asks. “In the forest with us?”
If I could click off my higher reasoning and concentrate with my instincts, maybe I could feel something. But I can’t. My instincts are fried to a crisp. The intense pain crowding in on me prevents me from sensing anything much beyond it.
“Maybe — I hope so.” All I know is they were here to help us. We ignored their warnings, and they broke through the barrier to stand by us anyway. But if they could snap our chains and wrestle us free from this place, they would’ve done it already. Their power here must be limited.
I remember that I haven’t told Tanvi my most recent dream. “When I was asleep, my dad showed me what happened here years ago.” I briefly describe the murders and Josephine’s insanity, Tanvi slowing again, bracing herself against a tree with her head bent.
“But the girl’s not the only one here,” Tanvi murmurs. “All those voices … and the woman you ran into out here. The old woman Cal saw upstairs, too.”
“Her victims. Maybe other family members too.” Her father, her brother. “They all seem unsettled.” Not at peace. “The whole place feels like it’s been tainted.”
Tanvi inhales deeply, like a cigarette smoker or someone fighting a panic attack. “It sounds like mercury poisoning. You said her dad had some kind of workshop here where he made hats?”
“Yeah. Are you okay?”
“That’s where the phrase ‘mad hatter’ comes from,” she continues haltingly, bypassing my question. “It used to be an occupational hazard. Something to do with felting. Hatters would inhale the mercury vapors used to treat animal furs. Prolonged exposure gave them tremors and twitches. But there are lots of different symptoms — headaches, weakness, respiratory problems, mental deterioration.”
Scientists got it too, I remember with a flash — a memory byte from ninth grade science class. Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton, Pascal. They all suffered from mercury poisoning.
Something gasps from behind us, the noise evolving into a series of truncated shrieks as I spin to look. My toes curl in my shoes, trying to hide from something they can’t outrun.
But there’s nothing to see. Not yet.
When I swing my gaze back to Tanvi she’s collapsing in slow motion, her fingernails snagging on the tree trunk as she falls. As I catch her in my arms, she slumps like dead weight but whispers my name. Conscious but weak.
“It’s okay,” I lie, depositing her softly on the damp ground. “Put your head between your knees.”
She does as I say. “I’m so light-headed,” she croaks. “Shaky and dizzy.”
Could be anything. Concussion from her fall on the stairs, exhaustion, dehydration. It almost doesn’t matter. There’s no cure for any of those things in this forest. There’s only death.
My left foot kicks against something compact and solid as I maneuver to sit down next to Tanvi. My fingers fold around it, confusion punching my ribs. The gun. Greg must have left it here in the woods. Whoever was in control of him had no use for it.
But it makes me feel simultaneously better and worse when I balance the Glock on my lap, a cold wind sweeping cruelly in toward us, rounding my shoulders and making me shiver. The deadfall around me blooms with sudden frost. Crunching an icy twig under my palm, I swivel to face Tanvi. Her chin rests snugly against her chest, her breath white against the cold. She’s out like a light.
“Tanvi.” I touch her hand, the ground freezing underneath my legs. “Wake up.” A fleck of white lands on my middle finger. Then another. A third catches in my eyelashes as I stare slowly up at the sky. Into darkness blanketed by heavy snow.
It amasses swiftly on the ground. Carpeting the forest in lies. This is no Christmas card scene, no matter how idyllic it looks.
I shove the gun hastily down the back of my jeans. My knees crack like old bones as I struggle to my feet, the shock rampaging through my brain like a heat-seeking missile that doesn’t know its target. Invisible fingers tap my chest where a coat lapel would be, if I were wearing one. I scrunch up my eyes as I tilt my gaze toward Josephine’s tormented mother, or whatever slice of her has remained.
The falling snow doesn’t touch her short-sleeved dress or hat, and my legs quiver as the exposed milk-white bone of her cheek jerks into a smile. The slant of her grin makes her eye bulge worse, its exposed sinewy red underpinnings cheerfully regarding me, waiting for me to give in and scream.
But my voice is gone. Covered in snow and ice, bone and blood.
Dad, I try to say. I need you.
I can’t hear the words in my mouth. Shantallow has stolen them; rendered me silent.
Josephine’s mother tosses her head back and howls, mocking me in my helplessness. The sound perforates one of my eardrums — the hearing in my right ear instantly withering and a sharp ringing taking its place. I bend to sweep up Tanvi, my knees buckling and ribs crumbling to dust. A tumultuous choir of overlapping voices wrenches at my better ear as I fall backwards, landing on my ass.
A branch snaps low behind me. I swivel in the snow, reaching for the gun. Somebody’s shambling lethargically through the trees, closing in on us. “Stay back,” I warn. “I’ll shoot.”
He doesn’t stop. Curving my finger around the trigger, I notice the familiar way he’s dragging one foot. “Greg, stay where you are!” I aim low, firing at his kneecap. Bull’s eye. Greg kicks backwards, slips like a cartoon character lurching on a banana peel. Then he rights himself and continues, eerie animal growl caught between his teeth.
He can’t hear me. There’s no rational way to get through to him. I hold up the Glock again, shoot at his other leg. He sinks to his knees, moaning low.
“Stay down,” I plead uselessly. “Stay down, stay down.”
Miraculously, he doesn’t move. Only continues to moan in the dark.
The voices are louder now. Near. The woman’s disappeared, but she won’t have gone far. She’ll be back. With reinforcements.
I push off the ground with my hands, careen back to Tanvi. Gathering her in my arms, my body revolts, forcing me down again. I can’t lift her. The pain won’t allow it. I’ve been overriding it, one way or another, all night. Not anymore.
But we have to get out of here. They’re coming.
I skirt around Tanvi, reaching for the hand attached t
o her uninjured shoulder. Then I drag her through the snow by her arm — hoping I don’t dislocate it — her head and body bumping ruthlessly along the ground, scratching against the fallen leaves and branches that lie underneath. My chest spasms in misery. My feet stumble. The trees at our sides outrun us and sprint back to taunt me, lining our route again and again.
A distorted male voice, forlorn and furious, wheezes, “He has cursed and forsaken us.” The sound spirals in the air, seeming to come from every direction.
Scanning the perimeter, I accelerate, only to slow again as we reach a wide, circular clearing. The first one I’ve seen tonight.
My hand tugs as I step forward. I glance over my shoulder, down at Tanvi, her body no longer dead weight. With the tree cover broken, open air above us, and ambient light reflecting off the snow, my eyes make out hers. They stare steadily back at me, glazed with shock.
I release her hand. It sweeps through the snow at her side as she rolls onto her knees. “What happened?” she asks, trying to stand.
Her legs tremble as I reach to help her, her head yanking in the direction of the voices as they surge behind us in a monstrous synthesis of anguish. “They’re still coming,” she mumbles, more to herself than me.
Panning her gaze around the clearing — the air thick with snowflakes the size of quarters — her eyes spring back to mine. “This is the place, isn’t it?”
From our dreams. I nod slowly. Her lip is swollen on the left side, her forehead scratched and bleeding. Like I’ve seen too many times in my sleep. The only detail that was missing was the snow.
“Don’t say it,” I tell her, my eyes burning.
I can’t do it. I won’t.
Tanvi folds her arms in front of her chest, rubbing warmth into her skin. “It’s what I always say, isn’t it? That you have to go on without me.”
I nod brokenly. I’ve broken so many times tonight, but now I’m bottoming out. My heart pulling away from my chest in pieces, my brain imploding with what I’m about to lose — the person I lost months ago to life, but can’t stand to lose to the possibility of death.