“What do we do? How do we fight that spider? How do we fight Grace?”
Becca shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t—”
I touch her arm, stopping her. “We’ll figure it out,” I promise. “You said you needed to get your things. Let’s get them, and find the others, and figure it out from there.”
She crosses to the corner, where the shadows have concealed a black backpack. The one she vanished with. She opens it and pulls things out. There’s a phone, probably long dead, and a flashlight, which she tests pressed against her palm so her skin takes on a glow but the light spills no farther. She puts everything back in the bag and settles it over one shoulder.
And then we hear the scream.
It seems to live in the walls. As if it is not echoing down the hallways but has been consumed by the thing that holds us, the walls themselves vibrating out the sound. The moment splits us in two, our instincts sending us arrowing in different directions before we correct—Becca away from the sound, survival the only truth in her blood, and me toward it. We stop steps from each other. Our eyes meet.
There are moments when the world realigns itself. The words for it are too grand—revelation, epiphany. This moment is more subtle. Pieces that fit one way find a new arrangement. Becca bends her course. She follows me.
We race toward the scream. We are not the only things drawn to it. We hear the clattering, the skittering, deep somewhere behind us, and the echoing clip of swift and steady footsteps. Everything that hungers hears prey.
But we’re closer. We nearly crash into them—Trina, Mel, Jeremy, Anthony. Where’s Kyle? I think, and then the spider-thing comes around the corner, too. There’s no time for stillness or silence. Too late for that. No time for reunions, either, and the skittering and singing behind us says there’s no place to run. Not down the halls.
The doors, maybe. I lunge for the nearest. We rush and tumble through. I try to slam it shut, but a leg stabs through, pierces the floorboards at my feet. I shriek and stumble. Someone catches me, hauls me upright—Anthony, face pale in the dark. Another door on the far side gives us an exit, but only the narrowness of the doorways is keeping us ahead of the creature.
“Scatter,” Becca says. “Find a place to hide.”
“No,” I say. There it is again: that shift, things fitting in a new way. She listens. “You said it hates the light. The woman—”
We can hear her steps. The faintest clamor of bells.
“We can lure them together,” Mel says. “I know how.”
No time for more than that. We closed the second door behind us, but the skittering drawing near says the spider has a fix on us—or its friend found us. Either way, we need to move.
Mel points. Four of us move, unthinking, to obey. Becca trails. Trina’s limping—ankle twisted. Jeremy gets a shoulder under her arm, helps her along. We shuttle left-left-right-straight-left, Mel tapping her fingertips against her thumb.
The skittering, the footsteps—they’re coming from opposite directions now. And they’re close.
“Hide,” I say. Through one last door, not quite closed behind us. We’ve dropped into stillness, though none so still as Becca, who stands apart from the rest, watching us with her head cocked to the side a little.
The spider—the pale one—stalks down the hall. The woman comes in the opposite direction, swift and angry. The light sweeps along with her. The spider rushes into it.
Through the narrow crack of the door, I can’t make out much. The woman makes that horrible shrieking sound. The spider screams. The hands in its chest scrabble at the ribs that cage them, and it rears back, blade-like legs slashing down.
Becca reaches past me. She puts her palm against the door and shuts it. Shakes her head. “Don’t look,” she says. “It’s safer not to look.”
She waits, then opens the door again. An empty hallway, the sound of inhuman screaming far away. She slips across the hall, and we follow. This door she leaves cracked. She turns. “You’re lucky. That shouldn’t have worked,” she says. She looks at the others. “What happened to you guys?”
“Grace,” Mel says, and Becca nods, as if unsurprised.
“Becca,” Anthony says. “Is it—are you really . . . ?”
“I’m me,” she says, smiling, face softening in a way it didn’t for me. “I’m alive.” And then she steps forward and kisses him.
I don’t want to tell you about what I feel in that moment, the jealousy that steals over me—the anger that she would go to him when she could hardly look at me. I don’t want to tell you about the kiss, either, the way her hands creep up behind his neck, the way his run up her back as if he has to feel the curve of it to believe she is real.
So I will tell you instead about the way her weight settles back, her heels lowering to the floor again, and the way that the simple movement brings her back to her center of gravity and brings Becca back. It’s as if she began waking up when she saved me and is finished now, free of the unceasing dream she has been trapped in for months.
I will not tell you about how I feel my ribs are twigs, snapping one by one, but instead about the way he leans his forehead against hers and lets out a sigh like he’s been holding his breath for a year.
“I told you that you shouldn’t have gone off with him,” Anthony says.
“Okay, great,” Mel says. Snaps. “So that’s new and weird and I’m so not going to get into it. Grace took Kyle. We need to get him back.”
“What?” Becca says, startled, eyes flicking over us. She didn’t notice. Eyes only for Anthony.
“Grace took him? Then he was still with you?” I ask.
“We were by—I think it was the exit,” Trina says. “She made noise to make the spider come. We couldn’t get to him.” I expect her to crumble, but she’s angry instead. Sharp steel.
“She’d made the halls into a loop,” Mel said. “I think she could have just gotten right back behind us. If she was dragging Kyle with her—”
“Then she could get out,” I finish.
“You shouldn’t have trusted her,” Becca says.
“We didn’t have much choice,” Mel shoots back. She still sounds angry—angry at Becca? Why?
“There’s no point in arguing. We can’t let them get too far ahead,” I say. “We’re even, at least. We can all get through. Fast. Catch up. Get Kyle back.”
“What about that thing?” Anthony asks. “What if the spider’s back there?”
“I can stop it,” Trina says. We all look at her in surprise. She holds the book tight against her ribs, her knuckles white where she grips it. “The book is a weapon—or the words in it are. The words to unmake.”
“Where did you get that?” Becca asks, voice a hiss of breath between her teeth.
“He gave it to me,” Trina says defensively.
“The preacher in the town,” I explain.
“You can’t read the words,” Becca says. “They’re dangerous.”
“They can destroy the spider, can’t they?” Trina says. “I can feel the power in them. They want me to read them. They want me to speak them.”
“You shouldn’t,” Becca insists.
“How would you know?” Trina asks. “Have you even seen them?”
“I’ve been here a long time,” Becca says. “And I’m not the first. Neither was Grace. The people who came before wrote their stories on the walls. Whispered them in the shadows, and the shadows sometimes whisper them back. Some of them say the words are a weapon. Some of them say they’re a trap.”
“I don’t care,” Trina says. “We need to get Kyle back. I’ll take any chance we have. We’re getting past the spider, and we’re getting through the dark.”
“We don’t know what’s out there,” Becca says. Desperation makes her voice brittle.
“She’s right,” Anthony says, but
I set my jaw.
“We do know what’s out there,” I say, meeting Trina’s eyes. “Kyle is out there. We have to go. And we’re wasting time.”
I step past Becca—between her and Anthony, really. I grab Mel’s hand. The motion has more meaning than I intend—or maybe I do intend it. Either way, we walk into the hall together. Trina follows. She’s limping but her lips are pressed in a determined line, the book gripped in one hand.
I realize I don’t know where I’m going. I glance at Mel. She shrugs.
“Not sure where we are anymore,” she says. “We need to do some wandering for me to figure it out again.”
“It’s this way,” Becca says, and my gesture of defiance loses some of its power as she and Anthony edge toward the head of the group, their hands entwined. He can’t look anywhere but her, it seems.
When we get to the exit, it isn’t the spider—either of them—waiting for us. It’s the woman.
She stands in the hall, still as stone, the candle guttering and the circle of light making wild judders around her. Something litters the floor at her feet. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s what’s left of the spider. Divided neatly. Sorted. Stacked. An eyeless head framed by six slender sections of rib. A leg, disarticulated at each joint and then arranged again in its proper shape. The spider, deconstructed, stretches the length of the hall.
The edge of the woman’s light touches the edge of the dark. There’s no getting past her.
“You.” The voice is the sound of insects crawling over each other. Of beetles spreading their wings, snapping them shut again. It comes from the woman, impossibly.
“You are a disruption. All of you. There must be silence, in this place. Or things will wake.” Or things will wake. The echo comes from the air around us.
“Then let us go,” I say, stepping forward. Becca claws at me but misses. I square myself in front of the woman, just shy of the light. “We’ll leave. No more noise.”
Her chest rises and falls as if with breath, though I don’t see how she can breathe. The bells chime at her back.
“You’re the one,” she says. “You’re the one she’s calling. Little insect. Little rat. Vermin. Looking where you shouldn’t. Talking when you shouldn’t.”
“Get out of the way,” Trina says, advancing so we’re shoulder to shoulder.
“You are not in charge here, girl,” the woman says.
“Move,” Trina demands.
The woman laughs. “The light will burn you hollow,” she says, and lunges for Trina. I shove myself between them, trying to block the woman’s progress. She bats me aside. She reaches greedily for Trina, but Trina stands her ground, feet planted, the book clutched in both hands.
The woman’s grasping hand is half an inch from Trina’s neck when she begins to read.
The words slide out of her, sinuous as a snake. I won’t write them down. I won’t write them down, even though they want me to. The book wasn’t there to preserve them. It was there to contain them. Once your voice gives them form, they aren’t so easy to leash.
The woman screams. Just as suddenly, the scream cuts off. Her head snaps back, the tendons of her neck standing out like cords. Her hands rake the air, fingers distending into needles, and the candle falls to the ground. The light pulses and heaves at her feet.
A writhing, twisting smoke spills from her skin, and rises from the pages of the book as well, and then the woman is becoming the smoke, evaporating into it, but the words won’t stop spilling from Trina’s mouth, an endless riptide of sound. The smoke flows into her mouth, her nose, and she gasps.
The candle gutters out.
The woman is gone.
Trina’s eyes roil with smoke.
EXHIBIT I
Text messages between Sara Donoghue and Becca Donoghue
Sara | Becca
7/6/16
I know you aren’t there, but I’m going to pretend you’re going to read these someday.
I miss you. We all miss you.
7/28/16
Where did you go? Did you mean to leave? Why didn’t you take me?
Are you alive? Are you hurt?
I love you.
8/9/16
I’ve been having these dreams.
You’re in them sometimes.
We’re walking somewhere. On a road. An old footpath. We’re in the woods.
Except I’m not me, and you’re not you.
9/2/16
More dreams. There’s a girl in them.
9/5/16
It’s Lucy Gallows. The girl I dream about on the road.
Ridiculous, right? Getting obsessed with old ghost stories.
Except it doesn’t feel ridiculous. It feels real.
11/7/16
Tttt[]ttt[]
Becca?
Ahcr.p-apsrchusrchu[][]
[Photo: Blurred, dark. Barely distinguishable as a road.]
[Photo: The same road. Clearer. A figure, shadowed. Female.]
Becca?
11/9/16
Lucy?
INTERVIEW
SARA DONOGHUE
May 9, 2017
Sara sits alone at the interview table, staring into the middle distance. She hums softly, a formless tune that collapses in on itself after a dozen notes. Her fingers tap against the table in that familiar, regular rhythm. Note: Camera was left rolling unintentionally between interviews. We do not believe she was aware she was being recorded.
SARA: You want to know about Miranda. I knew that Miranda was dead. I knew—
The tapping stops. She flattens her hand against the table, whimpers. She bends her head over the table, cupping her face in her hands.
SARA: The Liar’s Gate, the Sinner’s Gate, the Blind Man’s Gate. The Gate of Many Doors. The field. The flood. The first in the dark. The second on the road. Then the beast and the field and then—
She slams her hand down on the table, whipping her head up.
SARA: You can’t do this to me! You can’t do this! You can’t—
She falls suddenly silent. She walks to the door, tries it. Locked. When she speaks again, her voice is calm.
SARA: You can’t keep me in here forever, you know.
Her hand drops from the knob. She turns. Sinks to the ground with a moan. Her fingers catch against the edge of her sleeve, pulling it up to reveal the words written there: REMEMBER YS.
And near the crook of her elbow, hash marks. Three clusters of lines, further grouped, each dash of ink perhaps an inch long. 1-5-1, 1-4-3, 2-5-2.
SARA: One and five and one. One and four and three. Two and five and two. One and five and one. One and four and three. Two and five and two.
Her fingertips probe the lines. Her breathing eases.
SARA: Little tricks. They don’t change anything.
She lets her head fall back. After a few minutes, she pulls down her sleeve, hiding the writing once more. She stands and walks to the table. When Ashford enters several minutes later, she appears perfectly calm.
ASHFORD: Miss Donoghue. Can I get you anything before we get started again? Something to drink?
SARA: No, I just want to get started.
ASHFORD: All right. I believe we were just talking about your exit from the mansion.
SARA: Yes. And then—I think—I think I’d like to tell you about Miranda.
ASHFORD: Is that so?
SARA: It’s hard to . . . There’s a pattern to things. Like a map. You have to go in order.
ASHFORD: In order?
SARA: One and five and one. One and four and three. Two and five and two. We’re almost there.
ASHFORD: I see.
He does not sound as if he sees at all, but Sara nods.
SARA: But firs
t we have to talk about the field.
21
THIRTEEN STEPS. WE take them quickly, and the need to move forward, to catch up to Kyle, overwhelms the urge to let go. Trina and I come out of the dark with our hands firmly entwined and step through an open door at the back of the house.
Outside the sun slants down like a blade against our eyes. We flinch away from it. I have to shut my eyes against the onslaught. The afterimage on my eyelids supplies me with a flat expanse of scrub, and something beyond it—water? And the dark thorn of a shape on the shore, a tower. Lighthouse, maybe.
I force my eyes open again. The light hurts, but I begin to adjust. Trina is already running forward. The others emerge behind us—Jeremy and Mel, Anthony and Becca. I squint along the road. It snakes out through the grass, looping first to the left, then the right, a long switchback through the field. A dirt path has been beaten down between the ends of the switchback—a shortcut. A temptation. Another road, and one we can’t follow.
Two people move awkwardly along the road just ahead.
“There they are,” I say, and my eyes trace the length of road between us. They’re not far. A hundred feet. But the road curves and twists, and it will take us an eternity to reach them.
“Kyle!” Trina screams. Smoke still rolls and folds behind her eyes.
“Trina!” Kyle flings himself back in Grace’s grip, but she holds fast. He hits at her, flailing. Trina stutters at the edge of the road. Swears. Starts running down it, limping on her injured ankle. Anthony and Mel are quick behind, Becca flitting after.
Five crows make lazy circles in the sky above us, and I don’t move. I watch the next three seconds’ movement with a strange, analytical detachment.
First, Kyle’s awkwardly closed fist finds the side of Grace’s jaw.
Then her grip falters, and he flees. Then she lunges for him again, and they are falling, and the sun glints off something metal in her hand. A knife.
The others are hurtling down the road. A twisting mile to go. Jeremy stands at the edge of the road with me. A hundred feet to cross.
It isn’t until afterward that I realize that in those three seconds, I decide I am ready to die to save them. Any of them. It isn’t until even later that I realize that Jeremy had made that decision long before I did.
Rules for Vanishing Page 17