by Lili Valente
Cold air seeps in through the thin walls, making me shiver. “You’re not making sense, Einstein. We need to get you dressed and warmed up. I shouldn’t have let you get cold again. This is my fault.”
“I’m not cold.” Her head cants to the side and her brows lift.
If I didn’t know better, I would swear that she’s listening to someone whispering in her ear. Even worse, I would almost say that I can hear the voice, too—a soft, lulling whisper assuring us both that this is the way it goes. These are the parts we play, no point in resisting.
Might as well rage at the sun while it sets. No matter how loud we scream, or how hard we fight, the light is sliding away and there’s nothing we can do to hold on to it. It’s already slipped through our fingers a hundred times before.
“Not cold. Not hot. I don’t feel much of anything anymore, really,” Addie mumbles as she rises, padding naked across the room, her shadow moving with her.
At first, I only notice that the shadow looks strange, but then Addie turns to face the fire and I realize what’s so wrong about the dark form. The shadow is in front of her, not behind, the way it should be. The only light in the room comes from the fireplace and the candles on the mantle. Adeline’s face should be bathed in yellow and gold, but I can barely make out her features. The shadow is blocking the flickering light because it’s taller than Addie, too. Taller and broader through the shoulders, with long, straight hair that falls almost to the ground as it looks up at the shotgun mounted over the fireplace.
A shotgun that I would bet my hands wasn’t there when I stepped into the cabin.
And suddenly I’m no longer Nate Casey who loves Addie and is insanely worried about her. I’m Nate West, author of ghost stories and collector of unexplained things. I’m back in those endless hours I spent at that castle in northern Scotland, huddled in a ball on the floor, shaking and sweating because I was so tempted to hurt myself that I was afraid to stand up.
I’d never had a suicidal thought before that night and haven’t had one since, but in those never-ending hours, I came so close to ending things that it still shakes me just to think about it. I nearly killed myself that night, just like the man who had been hired to look after the castle before me, the woman who’d bought the property after it stood vacant for a century, and the original owner, a lord who had cut his throat to avoid being hanged for murdering his wife and child, when it became clear he wasn’t the baby’s father.
I’ve never seen anything like this shadow now, but I know there are things in this world that can’t be explained. I know that we are all haunted by our own monsters, and that sometimes those things are strong enough to live on after the people they torment are gone. Sometimes they leave scars on the next generation, the way our parents’ demons have left scars on Addie and me.
And sometimes pain cuts so deep that it leaves claw marks in time and space, shredded, ugly, stuck places that defy the natural order. Places almost everyone can sense are wrong if they take the time to stop and smell the air. Those are the places that become the inspiration for ghost stories—the woods that travelers are afraid to pass through after dark, the haunted houses where bad things keep happening no matter how many times a property changes hands.
My skin goes cold, crawling with the certainty that Addie and I need to get out of this cabin as fast as fucking possible.
“Adeline, why don’t you put your clothes on,” I say in a mild voice, not wanting to attract the attention of the shadow. “And let’s see if we can get through the snow in front of the door. The rescue team isn’t far.”
“That’s not how it happens,” Addie says. “It starts here. By the fire.”
“What starts?” The hairs at the back of my neck rise as something moves in the darkness by the table on the other side of the room. Another shadow, this one so large its head nearly touches the ceiling.
“You have the knife.” Her pale hand lifts, pointing at the other shadow and then at the mantle. “And then I have the gun.”
My gut clenches. The ghost story Mitch told me. Why didn’t I pay closer attention? Haven’t I learned by now that nothing, no matter how small, can be taken for granted?
“And then I try to get out. After, not before,” Addie says dreamily. She’s clearly caught up in a story that isn’t ours, but our story has power, too. I need to remind Addie of that before what happened in this cabin plays out all over again.
“Look at me Addie.” I step into my pants, wanting to be dressed and ready to haul ass as soon as I bring her back to me. “There isn’t going to be a knife or a gun. Things are different now.”
“Nothing’s different.” She sways closer to the fire. “And I’m tired of broken promises.”
“What promises did I break, Einstein? Do you remember?” I move closer, needing to be within tackling distance if Addie—or whatever else is in here with us—decides to go for the gun. “Can you tell me?”
“You said you wouldn’t go away, but you did. I had to cut the firewood myself. And when the men building the hotel came, there was no one here to protect me.” She sniffs, her voice breaking. “I was all alone.”
A man who went away and a woman alone, one who endured incredible pain. It’s no surprise Addie’s been sucked into this other woman’s story, but there are ways that our story is different, and the faster I can get her focused on those the better.
“You weren’t alive when the hotel was being built, Addie. The hotel opened over a hundred years ago. You weren’t even born.”
She glances my way, her expression wavering between anger and uncertainty. “I know what happened. You left!”
“I left seven years ago, when we were both kids.” I take another small step forward. “We never had the chance to live together, and if we had, I wouldn’t have left you alone. I would have cut all the wood and spent the winter tucked into bed right beside you, keeping you warm and showing you how much I love you.”
Her tongue worries the corner of her mouth as she shakes her head. “No, I remember what happened. I have callouses on my hands from the axe.” She lifts her hands, staring at her palms, blinking faster. “Wh-where did they go?”
“Do you remember the day we met?” I take advantage of her distraction to close the last of the distance between us. “What were the chances that we would both be reading the same old horror novel? And that we would both go down to the middle of nowhere, New Jersey, to visit the hellmouth on the same day at the exact same time?”
“We…” She frowns, then slowly nods. “We lived in different towns, in different states. If we hadn’t picked up that book…”
“We might never have met,” I say at the same time that she does, making her eyes go wide and her lips twitch at the edges
“Yes,” she says, her sudden smile fading. “I used to think that meant something.”
“It does mean something.” I hold her gaze, refusing to look at the shadow shifting restlessly near the fire, or the other shadow prowling back and forth beside the table, getting bigger and darker with every minute that passes. “Just like it means something that Eduardo and I were the first people to drive by after your car broke down, and that we both booked rooms at Tomahawk on the same weekend, and that of all the millions of people in New York we’re two of the very few who know a guy who runs a secret get-revenge-on-your-ex service.” I funnel every bit of my belief that Addie and I are meant to be into my voice. “The universe is trying to send us a message Adeline. Our story isn’t finished yet, not by a long shot.”
“Message! My phone!” She points to the floor where her clothes are spread out to dry, her voice growing more focused. “I was reading a text message from your friend Mitch before I fell asleep. The pervert who texted me from Paris is your friend! What are the odds of that?”
I’m about to assure her “zero to fucking none,” when she looks down and her arms fly to cover her chest. “Oh my God, I’m still naked.” She turns, casting a horrified glance at me over her shoulder. “D
on’t look! I need to get dressed.”
“I’ve already seen it all, babe. And you’re beautiful,” I say, too scared to take my eyes off of her for a second. I can’t risk losing her again. “But you should definitely get dressed. Get dressed, and then we’re going to get out of here, even if we have to dig our way through an avalanche to do it.”
Addie nods as she steps into her panties and reaches for her bra, fear creeping in to tighten her features. “I think you’re right. And I think maybe we were wrong before.”
“Wrong about what?” I keep my attention fixed on her as I hustle back into the rest of my clothes. The shadows are growing progressively agitated, pacing and rippling and raising their arms overhead, clearly determined to play out their story whether Addie and I cooperate or not.
Her throat works as she wraps her scarf around her neck and shrugs her coat on. “Maybe this is closer to a dream than you thought.”
“Agreed.” My pulse spikes as I tug on my boots and the shadow closest to Addie throws her head back in a long, silent scream. For a moment I’m tempted to ask Ad if she can see the silhouette, but decide against drawing her attention to anything that might pull her back into that other story.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to wake up.” Addie crosses the room and takes my hand, holding on tight. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Right fucking now,” I agree, heading for the door. Addie and I are steps away from the exit when the radio in my pocket lets out a loud, angry squawk.
I curse, fumbling for the walkie-talkie, but before I can pull it out, a woman’s scream erupts from the speaker. It’s so loud that Addie and I both cry out in surprise, our hands flying to cover our ears. The second our gloved hands part, the lights go out, plunging the cabin into darkness as the air fills with loud, angry voices.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Addie
I am an ordinary woman who has lived an ordinary life.
Or at least that’s the story I’ve told myself the past seven years, as I’ve done my best to forget the magical boy I met one summer and all the incredible things we discovered while we were reading and talking and making love and stealing away for adventures and falling so hard for each other there was a time when Nate felt like a part of me.
But there are some things—strange, extraordinary things—that you never completely leave behind, no matter how ordinary your life becomes. You can shove them deep down into your subconscious and tuck them behind a wall of boxes filled with things you prefer not to acknowledge with your waking mind, but all it takes is a whiff of memory to bring them rushing back to the surface with the speed of a bullet train.
As the room goes black and a woman’s scream fills the air, followed by the howl of a man demanding, “Tell me what you did! Tell me what you did, you fucking whore,” I’m sucked back to the summer before I turned seventeen. I’m back in the woods where Nate and I were lost for hours before we stumbled upon a shack where I mistakenly thought we might find help.
But instead we heard screaming. Screaming voices raging in the dark.
“We have to get out of here!” I try to reach for Nate in the darkness, but my arm is limp and weak, refusing to move. I’m inside myself and outside myself at the same time. A part of me is here in the shadows, with the winter wind howling outside and the screams of the woman begging for her lover to “let me go! Let me go!”
The other part of me is reaching for a rock in another time and place, where the summer sun is setting. She’s turning to Nate and saying, “Do it, please. We have to do something and you can throw harder than I can,” and watching as he takes the stone, pulls back his arm, and—
The sound of shattering glass fills the air as the rock breaks through the window, bringing light crashing into the room along with it.
I spin, smelling evergreens in summer as I catch a glimpse of the world outside through a hole in the muddy glass. I see a boy with broad shoulders and a girl with wild curly hair turning to run away through sunlit woods just as Nate screams, “Adeline!”
Outside, the girl turns, glancing over her shoulder with a shocked expression.
And from the darkness inside a cabin buried in the snow, I have the not-at-all-ordinary experience of staring through a summer’s day into my own eyes.
My sixteen-year-old eyes.
The eyes of the girl who has no idea what the next seven years are going to hold for her, but who wouldn’t be afraid if she did. She isn’t afraid because she knows that she is loved and strong and where she’s supposed to be, with the boy who is so exactly what she needs that there is no doubt in her mind that he was made just for her. I watch as the boy—Nate before he finished becoming a man—turns back for the girl, wrapping his arm around her waist and half-carrying her along the trail because there is no way that he would run for safety without her.
“Jesus. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Nate’s voice is a choked whisper, but I can hear him.
The screams are gone.
I take his hand, holding tight as the light streaming in from the window winks out. And then the air is cold again and we’re alone in a building so old and run down that snow puffs in through the gaps in the walls and the next strong wind could level the structure flat.
“Outside. Now,” Nate says.
The boards beneath my feet groan as he guides me across the room and rips open the door. We hurry down the stairs, which are no longer covered by an avalanche that happened over a hundred years ago, and cross the clearing without looking back.
“We’ll talk about all of that later.” He squeezes my hand tight, making it clear he has no intention of letting go.
“Later,” I agree, following him up the hill. The storm isn’t as bad as it was before. Enough moonlight filters through the clouds for us to make our way through the trees without a flashlight, which is good since we left both of our flashlights in the ghost house.
“But you saw it, right?” he asks, breath rushing out. “Saw…us?”
“Yes. Us. That day we were lost in the woods.”
“That’s fucking insane, Ad.” He shakes his head. “That isn’t possible.”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” I quote, though I’m inclined to agree with him.
“‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,’” he quotes back.
“A method seems likely. I certainly don’t know anyone else who has as much of Hamlet memorized as we do.”
“But those aren’t my favorite lines.” He stops, turning to grip me by the upper arms as we reach the edge of the tree line. “‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.’” He curls a gloved hand around the back of my neck, pulling me closer. “That one always makes me think of you.”
“Me too,” I whisper. “Of you.”
“I’m sorry, Adeline.” His breath is warm on my lips, but it’s something less tangible that sends a wave of comfort rushing through me. “I’m sorry I let you down and left you alone. I’m sorry you went through hell and I wasn’t there to at least hold your hand.”
“It isn’t your fault. But I’m glad you know. I should have told you before, but…” I shake my head. “I just didn’t know how. For years, I refused to even think about that time in my life. I thought ignoring it and pushing it away made the ugliness easier to live with, but it didn’t. It made it so strong I wasn’t sure I could handle letting the truth out of its cage. Does that make any sense?”
“It makes all the sense.” He wraps his arms around me, hugging me tight. “Stories are powerful. They can also be poisonous, especially if you’ve got no one to share them with. Sharing dilutes the hard stuff, makes it bearable, you know?”
I sigh. “Makes sense.”
“But you don’t have to carry any of this alone anymore,” he promises. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.” An unexpected laugh bubbles up from deep inside me. “Even if you tried, I have a feeling something would bring you back.”
“Right?” He casts a narrow glance back the way we came.
“You realize we might have the creepiest love story ever.”
“Good.” He smiles. “Seems fitting, considering the way we met, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so.” I wrap my arms around his waist, grunting as something hard digs into my ribs. “What is that? You got a brick in your pocket?”
“No, I’m just happy to see you,” he says, making me laugh again, though a few minutes ago I was sure laughter had left the building. “It’s my walkie-talkie. We’re probably close enough to call the search party and let them know we’re on our way back to the road.”
“Yes! Call them!” I pull away, making shooing motions with my hands to hurry him along. “The sooner people know we’re coming, the sooner I’m going to believe we’re actually getting out of these woods alive.”
“We’re getting out alive.” He pulls out the radio. “But what are we going to say happened while we were in the woods?”
“The truth,” I say, without hesitation. “I’m done with anything that’s not the truth. I’m not going to lie to myself or anyone else ever again, and if people think I’m crazy, then that’s their right. But it’s my right to say that a ghost cabin saved my life.” I frown. “And then it almost killed me. And maybe you, too. But we were saved by a rock you threw through a window seven years ago.” I press my lips together, nodding as my eyes grow heavy. “Right. I see your point. We’ll tell them we were lost in an area where your walkie-talkie wasn’t working.”
“Sounds good.” He presses the transmit button and speaks into the receiver, “This is Nate. I found Adeline. She’s okay, and we’re on our way back up the mountain. We’re at the tree line and should be able to see the road in just a few minutes. Over.”
“Thank God!” A relieved male voice crackles through the speaker. “We’ve got people coming to meet you. So glad she’s okay. Over.”