by Kat Ellis
“I guess,” I say, still lost in my thoughts.
“Great. I’ll see you there. And look . . . just ignore what I said, okay?” Cora bumps her shoulder against mine and smiles ruefully. “Everyone else does.”
With that, she hurries back to her place and the procession moves on. Once the tail end of the parade passes, the tourists around me follow, as though joining the savages who are about to attack Little Bird.
I hang back when the procession reaches the museum, stopping to stare at the building. The place is deserted, with no banners or garlands to make it a part of the festivities. It sits apart, watching. I feel like a long, bony figure might emerge from the darkened doorway at any moment.
I speed up and join the last stragglers following the parade. They lead me to the fairground. The gates are open and inside it burns with light and music and the clank of machinery. The Ferris wheel turns at the far end of the lot. I recognize its eerie, singsong tune. It’s Lorelei’s song from Nightjar. I shudder. For a moment, I wonder if the music is just inside my head.
I step through the iron gates for the second time. With today’s sunshine brightening the muted pastel paintwork, the place is transformed, alive. Long tables line the main walkway, filled with people laughing and eating and enjoying themselves.
“Excuse me, Little Bird.”
A man I don’t know squeezes my arm and steps around me. He’s carrying a pitchfork, which he waggles at me faux-menacingly before breaking into a grin. He thinks I’m in costume.
“I’m not . . .” But he’s already moved on, making a beeline for the buffet.
I spot Mr. Bryn sitting with Grant at the nearest end, and farther along is the girl in the Little Bird wig next to Faye and a girl I’m guessing is her sister, Jess. Opposite them, among faces I don’t recognize, Carter and Cora appear to be arguing again. I feel something like relief at seeing them: They’re at least friendly, if not exactly friends. But as I look at Carter, I realize I’m still annoyed at him. Why did he leave me at the museum like that?
“Hey, glad to see you made it!” Ranger Crane appears next to me and squeezes my shoulder a little too hard.
“Yeah. Looks like I’ll be in town a while longer,” I say, thinking about how she told me that Lorelei would hate me being here. Ranger Crane gives no indication she remembers that conversation now.
“That’s great! Oh, here—have some cake. And you should come join me and the kids. I know they’d like that. They’re such good kids. Terrific kids.”
Ranger Crane nods to where Carter and Cora appear to be solidly ignoring each other. She’s back to smiling, energetic. Chipper. Is that because she’s had a drink, or because she hasn’t?
“Sure. Looks like fun.” I inspect the plate the woman just thrust into my hands and stop. The cake is red with pale pink frosting, and thick, gooey red jam oozes from the center. It’s disgusting.
“Don’t you like red velvet?” she says.
“Yeah . . .” But this doesn’t look like any red velvet cake I’ve ever eaten.
Very gingerly, I break off a tiny piece of the red sponge cake and inspect it before I put it in my mouth. I immediately want to spit it out again. It’s far too sweet.
Ranger Crane beams, urging me to take another bite. “I’ll go grab another slice.”
She heads off toward the table where the cake is laid out on display and joins a line of people waiting to cut into it. It’s a really long cake, with parts missing where slices have already been taken. It could almost be . . .
No. There’s no way.
The cake has been made in the life-size shape of a woman—a woman who looks like Little Bird. Like Lorelei.
They are eating my mother.
I look away, but my gaze falls on Grant. He takes a huge bite of cake, then slowly licks the frosting from his fingers. Deep red jam oozes from it and drips onto the table, dribbling between the cracks in the wood. Everyone keeps stuffing it in their faces, that awful jazz melody tripping along with their voices, getting louder and louder as I stand there.
I cover my ears, and my plate hits the ground between my feet.
It’s quiet. They’re all staring at me. Carter gets up from the table, concerned.
The cake I just ate threatens to claw its way back up my throat. I want to heave it up, scrape it out. I want it out of me.
Carter calls after me as I run through the open gates, but I don’t stop. I barely make it to the road before I double over and start retching onto the grass verge.
“Lola, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Where did you disappear to yesterday? I looked everywhere . . .” Carter is next to me. I drag my sleeve across my mouth and shove him away.
“Leave me alone,” I snarl. Then I run.
I sprint all the way back to the house, not knowing whether Carter is following or if everyone is laughing at me. They can all go to hell.
* * *
• • •
“Nolan, I just need to talk to you. I need to know you’re still there. Please . . .”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I storm upstairs, not caring if I wake Grandmother. Her door stays shut anyway.
I head to the bathroom. When I catch sight of myself in the mirror, my face is a tear-stained mess and there’s a little bit of puke in my hair. Ugh. I’m almost done cleaning myself up when I hear a floorboard creak outside the door. Grandmother must need to use the bathroom.
“Just a minute,” I call out, and quickly dry my hands. But when I step out onto the landing, there’s nobody there. “Guess you didn’t need to piss that badly,” I mutter. Then I see my bedroom door is open. I know it was closed when I came upstairs.
Is she seriously snooping again?
Except the lights are out. What would she be doing in there in the dark?
Her bedroom door is still shut, and now I hear the faint sound of her snoring. My skin prickles in warning. There’s someone—or something—inside my room.
I toe off my shoes and stoop to pick one up. It’s a shitty weapon, but the best I have to hand. I pad softly across the landing and flip on the light.
Mary Ann sits smiling at the foot of my bed. “There you are,” she says.
I yelp and throw the shoe at her, but she just catches it and lays it neatly on the dresser.
“What are you . . . how . . .?”
“I told you I wouldn’t leave you,” Mary Ann says, and pats the seat in front of the dresser. “Come on.”
I’m frozen in the doorway.
Mary Ann hums as she smooths her hair in the mirror, pulling it forward to hide the deepest cracks in her face. The tune is the one Lorelei used to sing from Nightjar—the same song I heard at the fairground. Cora’s lyrics play over it in my head:
He got trapped underground for a really long while,
Then he fed on the dead and got a brand-new smile . . .
Mary Ann looks up and finds me still pinned to the spot. “Do you have someplace else to be?”
And that’s what saps the fear out of me, leaving me hollow. Because I’m in a stranger’s bedroom, staring at a girl who can’t possibly be here, and I have nowhere to run. No one to run to. Not in Harrow Lake.
Mary Ann reaches out and takes my hand. I feel her. Cold, smooth skin, but impossibly real. I let her draw me toward the mirror, sinking down into the seat facing it. My face is pale, lips bloodless. I look like I’ve seen a ghost. Ha.
“Do you know where we should look next?” Mary Ann asks. Her loose tooth makes her lisp. Nektht.
“Look for what?” My voice is a whisper.
“For Lorelei, of course.”
We used to look for her all the time. After Lorelei left, I wasn’t allowed to talk about her to Nolan, but with Mary Ann it was different. One night we tried to sneak out to look, but found ourselves foiled by locks and deadbolts, and Mary Ann sugges
ted we set off fireworks from a window as a signal. Lorelei would see them and know we wanted her to come home.
We didn’t have any fireworks, of course. So instead we burned snowflakes.
The snow wasn’t actually snow at all, just paper patterns we cut from the pages of a manuscript in Nolan’s study while he was out. We set them alight on the kitchen stove and sailed them out of a window, watching them spark and dance as they floated away into the night. Even though Lorelei never came back, for a little while it had seemed like she might.
Mary Ann narrows her eyes in the mirror. I have the uneasy feeling that she’s reading my thoughts. I try not to look at her, as though that might make her disappear, but my gaze keeps sliding back to her face. The cracked skin. The broken smile.
“Nolan’s ignoring you again, isn’t he?” she says. I don’t answer. “Maybe he’s mad. You know how he gets when he’s mad.”
Mad that Lorelei left. Mad that I’m not her. Mad that he thinks I’ll leave him one day, too. Wait . . . is that it?
I could leave Harrow Lake now, catch a flight, and be back in New York in a few hours. But . . . but what if that just makes everything worse? What if he’s angry that I came here? Or about having his filming schedule completely screwed up? Going back could be bad for his recovery.
Unless I can find a way to be the perfect daughter. Optimal.
There’s a small cosmetics bag sitting on the dresser, filled with the makeup my grandmother dug out for me to use. Nolan loves Little Bird. He loved her before he loved Lorelei, or me. He chose her.
I pick up the kohl stick, lining and smudging my ink-black eyes. Little Bird’s were blue, but it was impossible to tell in the black-and-white movie.
Mary Ann watches me, smiling as Little Bird comes to life in the mirror.
“You should cut your hair like hers, too,” she says.
She’s right. I need to be perfect. I pick up the scissors.
* * *
• • •
Mary Ann and I spent part of the night in the woods, finding trees that looked like the ones in the Nightjar forest scenes, and I spoke Little Bird’s lines and mimicked her movements as though they were my own.
Eventually, we went back to the house and I collapsed into bed. I didn’t even care that Mary Ann sat watching me in the dark.
The whole thing seems surreal now, like a half-remembered dream. I don’t know what I was even thinking, following Mary Ann into the woods.
She’d gone by the time I woke up. So now I set out alone to tick off another stop on my list: the Easy Diner. I’m wearing the right dress for it, the primrose smocked one with rosebuds embroidered onto the cotton. On Main Street I spot Carter coming toward me.
Oh, god.
The entire town saw me drop that plate and run. Who knows how many of them watched while I heaved my guts up outside the fairground gates, but I know for sure Carter did.
I duck quickly inside the Easy Diner and I’m blindsided by the Nightjar-ness of the place.
Everything is chrome and red leather. The ceiling curves down like the inside of an old railway car. Behind the old man at the register is a cathedral-style radio like the one in Grandmother’s house. There are booths along one wall, and above the third one is a black-and-white still of Little Bird sitting in that same booth, drinking a milkshake and side-eyeing the young guy next to her, wearing the exact dress I have on now. (By the end of the movie, he’s one of the torch-wielding creeps who kills her. Naturally.)
The diner is busy. Upbeat jazz plays on the radio, but it’s too quiet to tell which song it is. I’m still trying to figure it out when someone barges through the door behind me.
“So it was you I saw scurrying in here.” Carter is grinning. “I thought I was hallucinating. Honestly, you could’ve walked right out of Nightjar looking like you do. Nice haircut.”
“I didn’t scurry,” I tell him. “I didn’t see you.”
I pick up a menu from the counter, pretending to study it intently despite the CASH ONLY notice above the register. Carter takes a stool next to me and waits for me to put down the menu.
“Can I buy you a coffee or something?” he says.
“What do you want, Carter?” I say wearily. Maybe he wasn’t the one who spliced together that movie at the museum, but he left me.
Like Nolan did.
Like Lorelei did.
“A few things, actually.” He tries not to smile. “To see if you’re all right after you disappeared at the museum, and after what happened at the parade. To apologize on behalf of the folks here for not realizing how it would seem to you, seeing us all chow down on a cake made to look like your mom. And, last of all, I want a soda. How about you?”
“I want . . .” I begin. But what do I want? I want Nolan to call and yell at me to come home. I want the monsters I keep dreaming about to stay out of my head. And I want to know why Lorelei left me and never came back. “Does your offer still stand—will you help me find out more about my mother? And I didn’t disappear at the museum. You did.”
“You disappeared. I went to look for you. And of course I’ll help,” Carter says. Even though he’s trying to act prickly, I can tell he’s relieved. Maybe he was expecting me to freak out again like at the picnic.
“Your mom and Lorelei were friends when they were our age,” I say.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I saw a photograph of them together. They were sitting on a tombstone.” There’s no flicker of recognition on his face. Has he never seen the photograph I stole from his father’s study? Or did he simply not notice the girl standing next to his mother?
“I thought it was strange they were in a graveyard, because Cora told me you don’t bury dead people in town. But then I remembered the scene in Nightjar where Little Bird gets sacrificed on a tombstone, so I guess it must have been in the sinkhole where the church fell in. I really would love to see it.”
“They had to use scaffolding and cranes to get everything in and out for the film,” Carter says warily.
“But didn’t you say there was another way in?” I insist.
He shifts in his seat. “It’s sealed off now.”
“You know a way in through the caves, though, don’t you?” I guess, remembering the sketches I saw in his room. He didn’t draw the church by copying movie stills. “Or are you saying you’ve never been inside?” I make my voice low and teasing. “Are you scared you’ll wake Mister Jitters?”
Carter pauses a beat before answering. It’s a very telling beat. “It’s off-limits. But I’ll ask my mom if she knows anything about your mom that you might find interesting.” He slides down from his stool. “And we can go through the archives at the museum again, if you like.”
“Sure,” I say flatly.
Carter frowns. “Where did you go the other day at the museum? One minute you were there, and the next you’d vanished. I thought maybe you’d found something bad about your mom . . . or that I’d said something to upset you?”
The projection room, the spliced movie, Mary Ann. I could tell him that somehow she’s woken up. But what if it’s not this town that’s to blame? What if it’s something that’s in me?
Your mother was obsessed with Mister Jitters . . .
I like that Carter just sees Lola, not the daughter of a film director. That he snaps at me for being rude, and smiles like a wolf when I say something Optimal.
“I’d forgotten I’d promised to pick up some groceries for my grandmother,” I say, and he nods like that makes perfect sense. For a moment, I hate him for not seeing through the lie. But no matter how I feel, Carter is still a stranger. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It’s late, and I’m standing somewhere cold and confined. The ground is hard under my bare feet, and I hear the plink-plink of water droplets somewhere nearby. It’s f
reezing. Lorelei’s thin cotton nightdress covers me, but that’s all. My heart thuds, almost drowning out the sound.
What am I doing here? Have I been sleepwalking?
My head feels muddled, and I don’t know how I got here. But there’s something else with me in the dark. Not Mary Ann. Something . . . bad. I can feel it. It’s coming for me.
I step backward and the ground crunches under my bare foot, loose and brittle. I take another step, and the crunch is even louder this time. Snap-snap-snap-snap-SNAP. The sound swells—or the space around me shrinks until my eyes twist the darkness into chattering, lipless teeth.
Mister Jitters.
His cold touch traces the shape of my cheek. Drags slowly across my skin, down my shoulder, until it reaches the wound near my wrist. The finger slowly circles the cut—once, twice—then, with a sharp movement, it wiggles inside.
I jerk free, but fall into the gravel and start to sink. The ground is collapsing on top of me. I claw at it, trying to push myself back to my feet, but my hand lands on something hard and smooth, and I realize it’s not gravel.
It’s a pile of bones. A whole crater full of skulls and fleshless limbs.
I hear footsteps coming for me across the sea of bones.
And then I see it’s not Mister Jitters at all—it’s Nolan. He’s walking toward me, but he hasn’t seen me. I open my mouth to call out to him but I choke, spitting and crunching fragments of teeth that aren’t mine. They won’t stop pouring into my mouth, rushing down my throat . . .
I gasp awake. My legs are tangled in the bedsheets and I’m shaking, but as the moonlit room comes into focus around me, I know where I am.
Lorelei’s room.
“He’s coming,” Mary Ann whispers from beside me. “We have to go to the Bone Tree.”