The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  WEST recently purchased bungalow in Silver Lake. No pets.

  Hobbies: hiking, reading, movie buff (mostly kids films, foreign animation, Studio Ghibli, etc.). Fondness for out-of-doors. Devotes vacation time on outings to—

  * * *

  Bridge pulls the file out of my hand. Replaces it with one she’s picked up from the desk.

  “Let’s read this one together,” she says.

  BRIGIT QUINLAN

  Subject Profile

  Birthplace: Seattle

  Current residence: Seattle

  SUMMARY

  Brigit (called BRIDGE by family and close friends), aged 14. Emotionally intuitive. Academically average, athletically inclined (dance, soccer).

  Keeper of a journal she believes no one but her father has read. This is why he seems to understand her at a level more precise than even her brother, AARON.

  Father brought her alone to Belfountain when she was 5. This leaves her with conflicting feelings of being CHOSEN as well as CONFUSION about the event itself. She has the strong sense that her father is not a good man. But she remains divided in her theories on the possible NATURE OF HIS CORRUPTION.

  Personality (and her physical self) marked by a previous episode of survival. Her brother, AARON, a medical student at the time, performed an emergency tracheotomy on her using an X-Acto blade from a fishing tackle box (see: IMAGE INVENTORY) while on holiday at the Quinlan lakeside cabin. BRIDGE’s feelings about this are complicated. She is grateful to AARON, but blames her father’s absence at the time of the event. Where was he at the most frightening moment of her life?

  Above defines her operating mode as one of DISTRUST.

  * * *

  It’s my turn to flip ahead to the second set of paperclipped papers in the file the same way Franny pushed me. This is what Bridge is most terrified of. She reads with her cheek pressed against my arm, her lips moving as they mouth the words.

  OLIVIA GOLDSTEIN

  Origin Identity of BRIDGE QUINLAN

  Birthplace: Tacoma, WA

  Current residence: Seattle

  SUMMARY

  Olivia Goldstein (“GOLDSTEIN”) is the eldest of three daughters of Barry and Lee Goldstein. Father: Corporate finance. Mother: Recent return to employment at private accounting firm.

  GOLDSTEIN deemed academically “gifted” according to school assessments. Additional proficiency in athletics, primarily track (state finals).

  Accomplishments understood as particularly notable given GOLDSTEIN’s history of periodic, severe depression. Episodes of self-harm, including hospitalization following suicide attempt (scissor wound to throat). Note: This injury to be accounted for by BRIDGE as the scar from the emergency tracheotomy performed by brother, AARON (see above).

  Currently on daily dosage of Sarafem. Talk therapy has yielded no previous trauma or sexual/physical abuse. Assumed chemical imbalance by psychiatric evaluations.

  Stated career goal: marine biology. Love of marine life—whales, dolphins, sharks. Maintains extensive aquarium in home bedroom.

  * * *

  Bridge closes the file. Looks up at me with her finger tracing the outline of the scar on her neck.

  “I did this?” she asks. “I did it to myself?”

  “I don’t know, Bridge. I don’t—I can’t put it together.”

  “There are two people,” she says, the back of her hand slapping at her file. “Two people! But which one is me?”

  “I think we need to slow down—”

  “One is me, and one is somebody else,” she carries on, not listening to me or anything other than her own thoughts. “Except I’m the fake. The other person, the one I don’t know—the one who is so sad—that’s who I really am.”

  I have no idea how it was done. I don’t know what it means for us in anything other than this moment. But the thing is, I feel certain that what Bridge has just said is true. My little sister, the one person in the world I would die for, have wanted to make proud, is a forgery. Franny too. Which means I’m no more real than they are, no matter that the story that played out on the screen of my pod is the only story I’ve ever known.

  Franny staggers back from the desk. The paperclipped pages falling from her hand and fluttering to the floor like a graceless, multi-winged bird.

  “Something was done here,” I say. “Done to us. I’m not—”

  “Dad was—he was never real?”

  I reach out to Franny in case she’s about to pass out, but she jumps back from contact.

  “My child,” she says. “Nate never existed?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” I say, and would keep saying forever rather than tell her the thought that is gaining weight in my mind, in the very core of me, more certain than the face of the girl I lost my virginity to or my first day leading a procedure in the surgical theater.

  No, you never had a son. Nate was never born. Never lived, never died. He’s haunted you your entire life but he’s even less than a ghost.

  Franny sifts through the other files on the desk. I see Jerry’s name on one, Lauren’s on another. She pulls out the one with my name on it, but I don’t touch it.

  “Aren’t you going to read yours?”

  “Not now.”

  “What? Don’t you—”

  “Not now.”

  I fold the file in half and stuff it into my pocket. When Franny hands all the others to me, I do the same with them.

  “He’ll be coming back soon,” Bridge says.

  I start away but Franny grabs me by the arm.

  “Why are we leaving if everything is here?” she says.

  “We don’t know what this is.”

  “It’s us. It’s all we have.”

  “That doesn’t mean we have to stay.”

  “Then what does it mean, Aaron?”

  We’re flesh and blood. We feel and remember and love. Even if none of us are who we think we are.

  “It means we have to go,” I say.

  51

  WE MAKE OUR WAY BACK past the amateur landscape paintings. Franny and I keep our eyes ahead when we pass the other, bloodied hallway that leads to the room of pods. But Bridge flashes her light down its length.

  “Mom?”

  Franny doesn’t go back but I do. And see the same thing Bridge does.

  The old woman stands in front of the door with the porthole window. Then she steps closer. Her feet bulging and bare. The pale blue hospital gown open at the front, a peepshow of folds and moles and dried blood.

  The witch.

  I hear this. Think it’s Bridge before realizing it’s me.

  Our lights brighten her features as she approaches. The pockets of yellow in the corners of her eyes. The pair of scissors held in her hand.

  “Go,” I say.

  The skin of the old woman’s feet meeting the cracked concrete floor like the slap of meat on the butcher’s board.

  “GO!”

  52

  THERE’S A CATEGORY OF FEAR that denies you the air to scream.

  It’s why we’re so quiet as we run through the steel portal that’s been wrenched from its hinges. The only sound that reaches us is the old woman’s breath. Rattling and semi-verbal, as if searching for names or curses that have slipped her mind.

  The stairs were difficult to come down and are now almost impossible to ascend. I’ve situated myself at the end of the line so that I’m able to put my shoulder to Franny’s back. We advance like a worm. Stretching thin and muscling tight, over and over.

  The air reaches me before the light. A chestful of weightlessness. It doesn’t last long. Once we’ve emerged from the cave, the effort we’ve made arrives in a thousand needlepoints of pain.

  Franny is the only one to look back. Whatever she sees makes her jump.

  Spilling and sliding but never quite crumbling altogether; she makes her way down the ridge like a skier losing and regaining control, over and over.

  Bridge goes next. I’m about to follow when I feel th
e witch’s touch.

  The cold scratch of her hand on my cheek, the fingers hard as bone.

  • • •

  Falling down the ridge after leaping from its edge.

  Getting up after blacking out.

  Making it back to the gravel parking area outside the lodge.

  I can only confirm the last of these because that’s where I am now. Blinking away the light after being shielded by the forest’s canopy, watching Bridge and Franny rush to the lodge’s front door. My eyes catching on something on the edges of what they can see.

  He’s standing over the twins’ graves. His height accentuated all the more by his head being lowered. The stillness of a ceremonial moment of silence.

  Bridge seems to sense the Tall Man, not see him, as she slows even with her back to him.

  “Get inside!”

  It’s my voice, but it comes out stronger than I am, more aware of what is happening and the things most likely to come next. It doesn’t appear that Bridge hears me. But the Tall Man does.

  He raises his head, and the silver hatchet, glinting and slick as if carved from ice, slides up his pant leg. His mouth hanging open as before, but now it reads as anguish instead of hunger. Or perhaps it was always this way. These two absences combined as one suffering.

  “Run!”

  I tell Bridge this. I tell myself.

  I catch up to her at the same time we join Franny already pounding at the door.

  “Open it!” I’m shouting even as I grasp the handle and find it locked.

  “We left it open!” Franny says.

  Bridge is the only one of us keeping up with the facts of the moment. The only one watching the Tall Man.

  “He’s coming,” she says.

  The pruning shears. The ones I took from the shed. Is there time to fish them out of my windbreaker pocket and—and what? The thought goes nowhere. I keep pounding at the door. Franny joins me with her brittle fists.

  The door hears us. The wood gives way to the gray space behind it.

  I let Franny and Bridge in first, bracing for the hatchet to swing into my back.

  “Aaron!”

  Bridge has my hand, pulls me in as the door clicks shut.

  “Is it him?” Jerry asks. “Aaron! Is it—”

  “Yes!”

  “Does—”

  CRACK.

  All of us jump back as the silver line of the hatchet’s blade cuts through the door. It stays there like the tip of a tongue, tasting the difference between inside and outside, before it’s pulled away.

  CRACK!

  The second strike meets the first at an angle, slicing an X into the wood. Weakening it.

  We’d been quiet until this. Now all of our voices come together in a chorus of pleading. I don’t see her but Lauren’s voice joins in too. Only Bridge maintains anything resembling a coherent thought.

  “Leave us alone!” she shouts through the door.

  The rest of our voices fall off, waiting for the next strike to come. It doesn’t.

  We don’t hear him leave. There’s no way to see him as none of us dare go close to the side windows to look, yet we feel him go as if we do.

  “Why’d he stop?” Lauren asks nobody in particular, and nobody answers her.

  It prompts me to reach into my pocket. Pull out the files we’d taken and hand Lauren and Jerry the ones with their names on them. They hold them without opening them.

  “What’s this?” Lauren asks.

  “It’s what Dad kept in the cellar of the gingerbread house,” I say. “It’s us.”

  53

  “THIS IS BATSHIT,” JERRY SAYS, slapping his file onto the coffee table.

  We’ve retreated to the great room, deciding that being away from the door is worth being visible to the forest outside the giant windows. Without being asked Lauren tells us how they came back to the lodge for something to eat. When they found us gone, they lingered, guessing something was wrong.

  “So what is it? Other than that thing out there?” Lauren asked us. “What’s wrong?”

  Bridge and Franny did most of the talking. The discovery of the summer camp, the second cave entrance, the pods, the old woman with the scissors. As they traded the story back and forth between them, Jerry remained silent. Until now.

  “Are you listening to this, Lauren?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you agree it’s bullshit.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Can I ask why the fuck not?”

  “Because it explains so much.”

  “About why Dad locked us in here?”

  “No. About me.”

  Jerry looks around for someone to return his exasperation. “How about you, doc? You think we’re all clones or something?”

  “Not clones,” I say. “Just not ourselves.”

  “Because you saw a bunch of tanks with our names on them? That’s a hell of a leap.”

  “I know it’s hard to grasp. But think of the scale of this project, Jerry. They’ve gone to great lengths to keep it secret. So yes, what we’re talking about is pretty far past the boundaries of what we know. Far past what’s legal too. That’s why it’s been built way out here. Why there’s a fence.”

  “Why we can’t get out,” Franny adds.

  Jerry shakes his head at me but doesn’t have an immediate reply. He’s trying to not go where the rest of us have and it’s draining him right before our eyes.

  “So these isolation tanks,” he says eventually. “They put ideas in our heads?”

  “They put our whole lives in our heads,” Franny says.

  “Fake memories.”

  “Yes, but they don’t just overlap with our real memories,” I say. “The fake ones are all we have.”

  “How’d they do that? Kill us?” Jerry laughs uncomfortably. “Are we dead right now?”

  “Maybe,” Bridge says.

  “So what’s that make this? A dream?”

  “It’s not a dream,” Franny says.

  “One part of it is,” Bridge says.

  Jerry looks at her. “What part?”

  “The dark water. The sinking boat,” she says. “The music.”

  Jerry doesn’t shake his head at her as he had at me. It’s because he believes her, even if he doesn’t believe the rest of it yet.

  “How do I know you’re not making this up?” he says, addressing this to me.

  “You think we’re in on this?”

  “Could be.”

  “You’re arguing with yourself,” Lauren says.

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re trying to hold on to your disbelief but you don’t have any. It is insane. It’s also true.”

  This does it. Jerry has nothing left to fight with. He sits next to Lauren. Opens his mouth and closes it again.

  “I didn’t bring the twins’ files, but I read some of it when we were underground,” Franny says. “There was no Delta commercial. They weren’t even actors.”

  “Who were they?” Lauren asks.

  “Dentists. They had a practice together in Fort Lauderdale. Two kids each. They had lives.”

  “What about Better Together?” Bridge says. “We all saw them on TV. Well, you guys did. ‘Ah poop.’ That was their thing.”

  “There was no Better Together. They must have put that into our heads as part of the background to make Ezra and Elias fit in.”

  “I can only remember a couple scenes they were in anyway,” I say.

  “Me too,” Franny says.

  “No. Only one,” Jerry says, and it’s true. When I think of either of the twins as TV stars, I can only see them—or the one character they played—in a single sequence. A kid wearing pin-striped shorts, covered in chocolate ice cream, delivering his trademark line to his dad whose anger melted away at his son’s overwhelming cuteness as the studio audience uttered a collective awwwww.

  There’s a moment as we take the measure of one another, trying to read who is having the toughest time of it.
But we’re all equally bewildered. We all look ill.

  “I guess it’s time to see who I really am,” Lauren announces, and opens her file.

  It’s like watching someone sleep through a nightmare. There’s the same twitches, stretches of stillness, winces. A whimper of recognition before she raises her glistening eyes to us.

  “My name is Kayla Thomas,” she says.

  She was a pediatrician in Chicago. Her area of specialization was cancers of the blood. Work that meant everything to her, particularly following her divorce and the loss of her only child. A daughter, Addison, who died in a car accident with her grandfather—Lauren’s dad—behind the wheel. She never remarried. Never spoke to her father again.

  “I had a daughter,” she says, drawing Bridge close against her. “I don’t remember anything about her. Not her face, her laugh. Nothing.”

  Jerry is about to put his arms around her, but stops and pulls away.

  “What about Dad?” he says. “The will, the lawyer, the estate. None of that is real either?”

  “We can’t be sure about that,” I say. “There must be someone behind this. It might be him.”

  “What about the hatchet man? The old woman who came after you,” Jerry says. “How do they fit?”

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  “I do,” Lauren says. “Belfountain. The haunted forest. It’s a fairy tale.”

  “And every fairy tale needs monsters,” Bridge says.

  All at once Jerry stands as if discovering the sofa is smoldering under him. He grabs his file off the coffee table and opens it to the first page.

  “This is a description of me,” he says.

  “Keep reading,” Franny says. “The second section tells you who you were before.”

  He turns the page to the Origin Summary memo. Scans what might be the first paragraph or two before closing the file.

  “I’m not doing this,” he says.

  “Who are you?” Franny asks him. “You saw, didn’t you?”