I lay on my white comforter, staring at the stone wall. In my sisters’ rooms, I’d be staring at drywall. The stones were still there, hidden beneath the smooth painted surfaces. I wanted to believe my dad, that everything Gigi, Luca, and even what my mom had said about the inn was superstitious nonsense. As I stared, unblinking, at the stones—the stones that in the other rooms were present though perfectly concealed—I was unable to do so.
Thirteen
The sound of dishes being washed traveled up the stairs. It signaled dinner was over. I wasn’t hungry when they started eating, but smelling food for the last hour was making me wish I’d eaten.
I got up from my desk chair and went to the window. The chickens were already in their coop. I felt bad. I was supposed to have put them up. I wondered who took care of them for me.
Behind the chicken coop, a figure moved. I jumped back, hiding myself in the curtains. I wished I could reach my light switch without walking across the room. I crouched to the floor, still hidden in the curtains, and raised my head till my eyes saw above the sill. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be able to spot me. I watched him glance at my window and then down to the yard. He sat by a tree, partially hidden by shrubs. I tilted my head and tried to follow where his gaze was pointed. It was the room almost directly below mine.
I crawled across my floor. If anyone saw me, I’d look ridiculous; I didn’t care. I raised my arm to the switch on the wall and turned off my light. Then I crawled to my desk and turned off the lamp and shut my computer screen. I crawled back to the window and peered out. It was easier to see him now, even with the setting sun. He sat watching the room below mine and to the right—the study, where the rest of my family was likely gathered. This was where he always sat and always faced.
I watched Luca turn his attention behind him and then back to the house. He kept his attention mostly on the wall outside of my dad’s office, which was his focus every night. After a few minutes, he turned toward the woods and then slowly back to the house. This pattern continued for about twenty minutes. The murmurings from downstairs became quiet, and I heard Gigi and Avi make their way upstairs, as they did most nights, to get Avi ready for bed after prayers.
Luca sat at his spot by the trail. I heard Lisieux on the stairs. In an instant, Luca was gone, disappeared into the trail. In the middle of the trees, I could detect there was a glow; it was his house. He’d be there in a few minutes.
I fell onto my bed and pulled the comforter over me. The sun was gone and the chill was permeating my room. My stomach growled, but I didn’t care. I was warm and comfortable, the emotional day taking its toll. I was asleep in minutes.
The night was assailed by dreams of violence. In all of them, Luca was there, his amber eyes turning a dark magenta—the color of a demon’s eyes—immediately before he attempted to plunge a knife through my chest. I woke up soaked in sweat.
The house was silent. The clock on my desk read twelve fifteen. My stomach growled, I tried to ignore it but couldn’t. I sat up and pulled the blanket that lay at the foot of my bed, around me, tiptoeing down the stairs to the kitchen.
I turned on the toaster oven and removed the leftover pizza from the fridge, sliding two slices onto the metal grate. The heat of the glowing metal offered me comfort. I stood, staring at it, allowing its heat to warm me. When the cheese melted, I slid the pizza onto a plate and took it to the table. There was a full moon, so I sat in its faint glow, slowly chewing the mushroom pizza.
“I thought I heard something,” Gigi said as she came into the room and turned on a dim overhead light.
I squinted, lowering my head in defeat. I wanted to eat in peace, which was why I was eating at midnight. I said nothing and took another bite of pizza. I reached up and closed the blinds beside me. Now that Luca watched our windows, I knew better than to sit at night with open blinds, in rooms with lights on.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Tired,” I said, hoping it was enough and she’d leave me alone.
She twisted the knob of the gas stove to heat the kettle.
I let my head drop further. It was not enough; she sat beside me, watching me chew.
She said, “Why did you hide all evening?”
“I had a lot of school stuff to do,” I lied.
“And you didn’t want to be around your crazy grandmother,” she said.
I remained silent.
“I don’t blame you,” she replied. “Though for the record, I’m way less crazy than my mom was, and my grandmother was way worse than either of us—though she doesn’t count.”
“Why not?” I asked, then instantly wished I hadn’t. I’d taken the bait and I didn’t want to do that; I simply wanted to eat and go back to bed.
“My mom had lots of wonderful qualities, and of course I do too,” she joked as she watched me. “My grandmother—may God have mercy on her soul—was not a kind woman and she was not married to a kind man. I’m not sure either of them had even a good quality, let alone a wonderful one.”
“That’s why your mom left and you did too,” I said with understanding.
“Yes,” she said, pushing herself up from the table. At the stove, she removed the kettle as it began to whistle. “They were not kind people.”
“Did they hurt you?” I asked. Something about a conversation at midnight made it easier to say what I thought.
She returned to the chair in front of me, a mug of tea in her hands.
“No,” she said. “They never hurt me in the traditional sense. Nor did they beat or abuse my mom. There was plenty of damage done, but nothing could ever have been proven.”
“If they hurt your mom, why did she bring you back to them?” I asked, chewing slowly.
She rubbed the rim of her cup with her finger as the water cooled to a drinkable temperature. “I don’t think she understood all the damage being done. I certainly didn’t, not when I left at thirteen. All I knew was I had to go, I had to run. It was like there was a magnet pushing me from this place. I didn’t understand why.”
“If they were so awful, why did you come back here?”
“We didn’t return to them, we returned to our town. Your grandfather wanted to see where my mother was from, and I wanted to show him. When we arrived in the town, we felt this was where we were meant to be. It was odd how sure we both were,” she said, her focus drifting to the past for the briefest moment.
“We found a little room for rent, and jobs. We were better with money than most, and within a few years we owned a little home, and a few others, we rented out. About that time, my grandfather passed away. I didn’t find out until months after he was gone, though I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d known,” she said with full acceptance of the past.
“A year or so later, your father was born. After a few more years, I started to think about the land my grandparents owned. I thought of the blueberry bushes and the sea framed by cliffs. It was the perfect piece of property, so pristine, so beautiful, or at least it was when I was a girl.
“I told myself it might be completely different now that I was an adult and a parent. It might not be nearly as beautiful as I remembered. I shared my thoughts with your grandfather. One evening when your dad was about nine or ten, your grandpa told me a friend of his heard the inn was closed and the land was about to go into foreclosure.”
“Your grandmother hadn’t told you?” I asked.
Gigi took a sip of tea. “It’s difficult for you to understand, but I had nothing to do with her. If I saw her in town, which was very rare, I went in the other direction. I wanted her to have no contact with your father or me—or your grandfather, for that matter. So, no, she didn’t tell me. We didn’t speak. I doubt she even knew where we lived or that we were slowly buying up property all over town.
“Her property, this property, was the property I wanted most. It’s hard even now for me to understand why. I was drawn to it and so was your grandfather. We’d been hearing rumors for years the inn wasn’t do
ing well, so we figured it was simply a matter of time before we’d be able to buy it. The construction on this place,”—she opened her palms, gesturing to the house we sat in—“stopped about two years before. She’d run out of funds. We’d been told by the contractor it sat unfinished.
“Your grandfather spread the word around town that we wanted to buy the property. People were surprised. They didn’t realize I was related to the owners or had even been out to the old inn. No one from town ever came here. No one who actually knew my grandparents wanted anything to do with them, or at least didn’t, by that time. Though I remember as a girl, locals did come out from time to time, but that stopped before we moved back.”
“Why?” I asked.
She sipped her tea, holding the mug tight in her hands. “I never knew for sure. I asked the older people, the ones who I thought may have come out here. They never told me. This was after we moved in here, and they realized I was related. Perhaps if I’d asked before they knew who I was, they would have told me, but I wasn’t interested before then. They were scared of the place, though. That much was clear.”
“Scared?” I said.
She nodded. “Quite. Your dad makes it sound like Luca, Sam, and I are the only ones afraid of the inn. Truth is, everyone in town who was older than me was terrified of it. It’s the reason we got the land for so little. After the bank foreclosed, they practically gave it to us.”
“You bought it from the bank? Your grandmother didn’t give it to you?”
Gigi chuckled. “Are you kidding? She hated us for buying it. She probably hated us more than she hated anyone else,” Gigi said thoughtfully. “So, no, she did not give it to us.”
“Why did she hate you so much?”
“We stole her land,” Gigi said. “And no amount of reasoning could convince her otherwise.”
“Did you kick her out?” I asked, thinking perhaps that was the reason for the hatred.
“Of course not,” Gigi said. “Your grandfather even offered her a room in this house, after it was finished. I didn’t speak to him for two days after he did that. Thank goodness she hated us far too much to live under the same roof as us. She lived at the inn until she died. She rarely left.”
“What about food and electricity?” I asked.
“She was good at fishing,” Gigi said, “and she never had electricity. I suppose you can’t miss what you never had.
“Your grandpa took food to her, and she spit on him. Then he tried leaving food for her. She never touched it. Animals did, but she never did. After that, he stopped trying.”
“She spit on him?” I said, disgusted at the thought.
“She was truly a vile woman, or, as we started to understand, evil.”
I shivered, pulling my blanket around me. “I don’t believe in that,” I said, trying to make my voice sound stronger than it was.
“You don’t believe in evil?” Gigi asked, lifting her pale eyebrows ever so slightly.
“I believe in evil, but I don’t believe in people being evil,” I said, unsure even in my own mind what the difference was. There was a difference; of this, I was sure.
“That’s fine,” Gigi said. “Far be it for me to tell someone what they should or should not believe.” She took a sip of tea and set her mug on the table. “Of course,” she said calmly, “your belief about something does not alter reality.”
“Maybe it’s you whose beliefs are wrong,” I said in a defiant tone I wasn’t used to hearing come from me.
She grinned. “Your voice sounds exactly like my mother’s. I never realized that before,” she said with nostalgia. “Perhaps I am the one who’s wrong or the one who’s crazy, which is what you were actually thinking. If I am, then Luca is the same and so is Sam and so was your mother.”
I did not speak. It wasn’t fair for her to lump my mom in with her and the others—others who were not exactly the picture of sanity.
“But not Dad,” I said, fighting back.
“The ironic thing is he’s the reason we realized she was more than merely an awful old woman. He’s the reason we learned something demonic was going on,” she said slowly, focusing on her mug as if remembering something painful from long ago. “But you’re right,” she said, blinking up at me, “he wouldn’t believe any of it now.” Her voice sounded resolved to a truth that made her sad.
She stood, leaving her tea where it was, and went toward the stairs.
“Good night, Siena. I’ve disturbed you enough for one night,” she said with the same sadness.
I should have asked her what she meant or why she sounded so upset, or a million other questions, but none of those entered my mind until long after she’d left the room and I could hear her footsteps on the floor above me.
I placed my plate and her mug in the dishwasher.
In my room, I went to the window for no reason other than habit. The trees swayed in the heavy wind. The moon was rising above the sea. My eyes focused on it, and then the subtlest of lights caught my eye. I moved closer to the glass.
There was a light in the inn. My body almost spasmed, it shivered so hard. I jumped into bed and pulled the flannel sheets over my head. I was too scared to think, too scared to do anything but lie there trying to fall asleep.
Fourteen
The next day I awoke with clarity—clarity I had lacked the night before. I resolved to think nothing about any of the events of the previous two days. Yes, Luca passed out, and yes, that was weird, but people passed out all the time. That certainly did not prove he could sense evil. It meant he needed to be more aware of his blood sugar and possibly go to the doctor.
Gigi was an amazing grandmother, but she was a bit extreme in her thinking about many things, not simply about ghosts and goblins and whatever other strange creatures she believed in. And the light I’d glimpsed in the middle of the night was merely my exhausted mind playing tricks. Or, at most, a reflection of the full moon off one of the dust-covered windowpanes acting as a mirror. The inn was old and delipidated and physically dangerous, like Dad said. But it was not a spiritual threat. How could it be?
The day was bright and sunny, the wind had calmed down, and there was a fresh carpet of red, gold, and orange leaves covering the lawn. Today would be better, I told myself. I repeated this mantra every morning until Friday, when I woke up and didn’t have to remind myself the day would be better.
Gigi had stopped talking to me about demons. Luca hadn’t been around except at night. Though him staring at the stones of our house now felt normal, so even that didn’t bother me. Thomas and I texted back and forth a few times. He was nice, checking on Luca and apologizing for going toward the inn. It was nice to have someone to text with. It was, I realized, nice to have a friend. I was looking forward to seeing him the next day at the church’s fall festival.
Of course, the fall festival would only happen if people showed up, and they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t know it was happening or where to park. Which was why our kitchen and the hallway leading to my dad’s office were now overrun with neon-colored poster boards.
I was the designated sign maker at our church. It didn’t matter if I volunteered or not; everyone in the church automatically assumed I’d do it. I didn’t mind. I always enjoyed practicing lettering and there weren’t many opportunities to use those skills unless I was making signs or addressing wedding invitations, the other thing I was automatically volunteered for.
“These look great,” Dad said as he stepped over me on his way to his office.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to match the style of writing to the type of vendor.”
“Hmm, yes, I can see that,” he said, studying the sign I was working on.
I knew he couldn’t see it. He never thought about the way he formed letters or even the font he used when typing. He was odd in that way. Or perhaps I was the odd one. I often spent well over an hour picking out the perfect font for my reports.
That may not have been the best use of time. Thoug
h, in the case of the fall festival, everyone agreed, my attention to detail was important. This was our church’s biggest activity for the year and the most fun by far. Our festival was renowned, attracting vendors from across the state and visitors from across the country.
***
Several hours after dinner, the signs were almost finished. I was too perfectionistic—I couldn’t help it. It’s the reason the church always gave me lots of extra poster boards. I glanced at the stack; I’d used almost all of the extras.
“Can I help you with the last few?” Dad said, checking his watch.
The rest of the family were already upstairs in bed.
“No, I only have two more to do. They’ll be ready for you when you wake up,” I said, aware Dad was meeting his team at five to put out the signs and start coordinating the vendors.
He yawned. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, please go to bed,” I said, holding the paint marker in my hand as I tried to think of some more funny yet polite ways of saying “You can’t park here, and if you do, you will be towed.”
“Okay, if you’re sure,” he said, already heading up the stairs.
Thirty minutes later I stood and stacked the dry signs into a pile, leaving the wet ones to finish drying while I slept. I turned off the light and climbed the stairs. In my room I fell onto my bed, pulling the covers over me. I stared out my window as my eyes became heavy. I closed them. Painted words on neon blue backgrounds floated in my mind. I opened my eyelids to clear the image and perceived a faint light in the distance. I stood, going to the window. The light flashed softly.
“It’s at the inn,” I whispered. “It must be.”
I watched for a few more minutes, until the light disappeared. I turned in the direction of Luca’s house. It was dark. Was it him? Was he going into the inn at night?
I shifted my body to face the inn framed by the sea. No light. I was imagining things—my tired mind playing tricks. I slumped back to my bed and pulled the covers over my shoulders.
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