“Something like that.” Briggs sighed. “So, Zoey, you called the Boston office? What’s going on, honey? Does your dad know you called us?”
Zoey’s frown deepened. “Look, we may have met before, supposedly, but I don’t remember you, and I don’t want you to call me honey.”
Briggs didn’t skip a beat. “Fair enough, Zoey. I’m sorry about that.” Then he paused, laughing softly, and when he spoke again, there was less performative friendliness in his voice. “You two are so alike, you know. He called me maybe a couple of hours before you did.”
That was surprising. “Oh?” Zoey said, keeping her voice casual. “He told you about what’s been happening out here?”
“He did.” Briggs sounded tired. “Two girls gone, so close to each other. I tell you, it makes me sick. I know people are scared, and that you are, too. I’m going to help you, and your dad. I don’t intend to leave until we’ve gotten some answers, all right?”
“Wait.” Zoey straightened. “Leave? You’re coming to Sawkill?”
“Actually, Zoey,” answered Briggs, his words punctuated by the familiar foghorn blast of the Sawkill ferry, “I’m already here.”
Val
The Cover-Up
Val crept through the Kingshead Woods at her mother’s side, a bag of dead girl-parts in her arms and her stomach a snarl of knots.
Jane had been a particularly messy meal, and Val had decided she had no choice but to recruit her mother’s help.
She was already beginning to regret that decision.
“Walk faster, Valerie,” snapped Lucy Mortimer, shoving a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
Val obeyed. The sight of her mother’s unkempt hair lodged in her chest like sickness. Normally, Lucy Mortimer would have never set foot outside her bedroom with even one misplaced strand, much less left the house in such a state.
The reason was obvious: her mother was panicking.
Val decided to keep breathing. One step, one inhale. One step, one exhale. With every footfall, she concentrated on dissecting her newest secret:
During the night, she’d heard a crash and a cry from outside. She’d squinted out her bedroom window to see one of her family’s horses break out of his pasture and tear off into the night.
And Marion had run off after him.
But she hadn’t just run, no. One moment she had been on the ground by the ruined fence. Then she was gone, vanishing into the trees so quickly that Val thought she’d imagined it.
She’d woken her mother, told her one of the horses had gotten loose—and said nothing of seeing Marion.
They’d searched the pastures together, then received a call from the police station. Gregory Hainsworth, out night fishing off the island’s northern shore, had called the station in a panic. From his boat he’d seen a horse topple off the cliffs and hit the rocks in the water below.
A quick trip to the cliffs, a police boat searching the water with a spotlight, had revealed the gruesome truth: one of Lucy Mortimer’s stallions, American Glory, dead in the water.
Val’s mother had burst into quiet, dignified tears that disappeared as soon as Deputy Montgomery returned to the station. Val thought maybe even some of the tears had been real.
But there was no time for mourning. Her mother was now convinced someone was after them. That someone was close to unraveling the truth.
“I assume it’s Chief Harlow,” she had told Val, matter-of-factly drying her tears in the kitchen. “He’s always hated us. Him and that horrible daughter of his.”
“Neither of them would hurt a horse like that,” Val protested, trying not to think about seeing Marion by the pasture. Marion wouldn’t hurt a horse, either. Would she?
Marion couldn’t disappear in the blink of an eye.
Could she?
Except Zoey had thrown Val twenty feet through those flower beds like Val was a toy, like Val was nothing.
Her mother had fixed her with a cool stare. “No. I suppose they wouldn’t.”
Val knew what her mother was thinking: if someone found out what their family had been doing, if the line broke at last and the mansion was closed, the stones destroyed, the red room below the library filled and buried—then it would be Ms. Mortimer’s fault, not only that their way of life had been disrupted, but also that his impending freedom had been threatened. And no form of punishment humankind could think up would be worse than what he would do to her mother for that.
So they left Kingshead once more and scoured the woods until dawn, just to be sure.
After an hour of silence, Val dared to speak. “Did you ask him? Did you confirm a number?”
Lucy Mortimer, crouched in the weeds beside a small ridge, didn’t even look up from her search. “I did.”
Val waited until she couldn’t. “Well? And?”
Her mother straightened and stretched. “He requires two more meals before his growth is complete. Then he’ll no longer need us and will be free to roam across the world as he pleases.”
“I see.” Val worked so diligently to keep her face expressionless that a headache formed behind her eyes. “And what will happen to us then? Did you ask him that, too?”
A light shifted in the trees, casting shadows across Lucy Mortimer’s face. “He said that all depends on you, Valerie. How quickly you work. The quality of your hunts. Satisfy him, and we’ll be allowed to live our lives as we see fit, as long as we maintain the property and grounds as he wishes, and provide for him in every fashion he desires when he arrives for a visit.”
Val swallowed. When he arrives for a visit. As if he were an eccentric uncle who tended to drop by unannounced. “And if he isn’t satisfied?”
“He wasn’t specific on that topic.” Val’s mother scratched the side of her mouth, her eyes unblinking. “He simply said you would regret it.”
You. Not we.
Val would regret it.
Another girl might have cried then. Another girl might have worried for her life.
But as Val watched her mother dig through the brush, she could think only of Marion. Marion, pressing her against the barn wall. Marion’s warm hands cupping Val’s hips. Marion’s tongue, clumsy but earnest, opening Val’s mouth.
“What will he do to everyone else?” Val asked. “Once he’s free, what will he do?”
Her mother looked up at her, frowning as if utterly bewildered.
“Haven’t you thought of that?” Val asked, knowing the answer. “Haven’t you worried about what will happen to them?” She took three swift steps toward her mother. “Mom, we can end this. I know it’s terrible, but we can. It can end with us, before he has the chance to finish.”
“I will feed,” came his voice abruptly. A shapeless shadow jumped from tree to tree over their heads—agile, dizzingly swift. “That’s what I will do, once I am free. I will find the others, in all our worlds that you are too stupid to find, and we will make many more. And if you try to die, you will fail. I will make sure of it.”
Val silently bent low to search the woods, her eyes stinging, but with the memory of Marion’s lips on hers, she was no longer quite so afraid.
Don’t lose yourself to him, my darling one, Val’s grandmother had told her. Not all of you. Keep a morsel for yourself.
Val clung to the memory of Marion’s kiss as if it were the last crumb of food in the world and thought, Mine.
It was hers, and hers alone.
He would not take it from her.
The island still crawled with search parties, officers, and volunteers calling for Charlotte and Jane. Yet none of them noticed the Mortimers, not even when Val and her mother walked right past them.
He made sure of this. He delighted in his power, in his ability to so thoroughly pull the wool over so many eyes.
Val kept her own eyes on the ground, the back of her neck tingling from the weight of his unblinking gaze overhead. Had he also seen Marion, by American Glory’s pasture? And if he had, just how close had he gotten to her? Val’s stomac
h turned at the thought of him watching Marion from the trees.
Together, uninterrupted and unseen, Val and her mother collected a small sackful of body parts.
Val identified them at once: Jane Fitzsimmons’s shoe. Charlotte Althouse’s unblinking blue eye, marred by burst blood vessels.
Now Val carried a burlap sack rank with forest rot and decomposing flesh. Dutifully she followed her mother out of the Kingshead Woods and into the network of tunnels her great-great-great-grandmother had dug out underneath the mansion—with his help, of course. She had been a doomed woman, Deirdre Mortimer—abused and destitute, she’d assumed a new name and come to Sawkill in its early days. Desperate for work, she’d fallen for the owner of Kingshead at the time, a financier named Richard Carrington. He’d hired pretty young Deirdre as a maid, then seduced her. Then he began to hurt her, with his fists and his words, because that was all he knew how to do. Because he was powerful and she was not. Because he was man and she was not.
Could Val really blame her ancestor for making a deal with a devil, once he found her? Long life, health, power, vitality, safety, and disposing of that awful Richard Carrington, too—all in exchange for helping a monster from another dimension find his meals and use her blood to host his own growth?
Val clenched her fingers around the bag she carried.
Yes, Val blamed her.
And no, Val didn’t.
Theirs was not a world that was often kind to women. And if Deirdre had decided to sell her soul for a bit of comfort, an illusion of safety, power she had long been denied?
Well, thought Val mutinously, maybe that’s the world’s fault.
Maybe these monsters are what they deserve.
One of the tunnels below Kingshead led up to the red room, where he came when he wanted to play at being human, when he longed for the sensation of silk against his body as he lay with Val’s mother in that awful empty room of stone. Sleeping with his human form, Lucy had taught young Val, was a way to strengthen the bond and make it easier to serve him.
It was a room that would someday belong to Val.
Another tunnel led out to the gently lapping waves below the cliffs, where Val had sat with Marion on her favorite bench. Val and her mother emerged here, in a tiny boat, rowed out into the deep of a small cove—a private inlet that only people at Kingshead could access, and that he made sure to keep veiled from prying eyes. They added a few heavy bricks to the bag of girl-parts and dropped it into the mumbling black water.
As Val rowed her mother back to shore, she imagined she could feel the sack sinking to the ocean floor, where it would come to rest in the cold dark, with the bottom-feeders and the luminescent creatures, with the abandoned and the never-to-be-found.
By the time they reached the tunnel and started climbing back up to the mansion, Val had decided she wouldn’t confess what she had seen during the night. Not yet. Marion’s secret, whatever it was, whatever allowed her to vanish in the blink of an eye—whatever secret enabled Zoey to fling Val away from her like she was some kind of superhero—these were secrets Val would keep, for now. She’d threatened Quinn, John, and Peter so thoroughly that she knew they wouldn’t dare mention the incident with Zoey, not to a single soul, not while Val still drew breath.
A girl who can vanish, and a girl with incredible strength.
These impossibilities, Val thought, might be two sides of the same fantastical coin.
And she didn’t want to share that notion with anyone just yet.
Not because I want to protect Marion, Val told herself, almost believing it. It’s because I want to watch her, and uncover her secrets on my own, and Zoey’s, too.
It’s because one kiss isn’t enough.
It’s because, Val thought hollowly, the sea wind at her back, I might die soon.
Trailing her mother up the darkened stairs of Kingshead, Val looked into the shadows and saw a tiny fluttering piece of white—a moth, with peculiar black eyes on its wings.
Ssss-ssss, hissed the moth’s wings, hovering close.
Val extended a hand toward the moth, and when it landed on her index finger, a sly chill ricocheted down her body, nape to navel.
Mine, came a small, faint voice. Val’s weary mind ascribed it to the moth. She allowed herself the moment of fancy, cradling the tiny creature against her chest as though guarding a flickering flame.
BUT, OH, THE MOTHER AND daughter had missed one.
Because, the Rock thought, the woman loved few things in the world, but she had loved that stallion, and the loss of him clogged her senses, left her cloudy and distracted.
Because, the Rock knew, the daughter was thinking of a girl she had kissed, and grappling with terrors no child should have to face.
The Rock saw that they had missed it, and cried out for the girl to warn her:
A pale hand, bleached white and bloodless, clutching a starfish charm on a silver chain.
Zoey
The Tesseract
Forty-five minutes after fleeing her bedroom, Zoey hid in the shrubs down the street from her house, waiting for her father to leave.
She watched his patrol car drive down the street, stop at the corner, and turn west. Maybe heading for the docks, to pick up Agent Briggs?
Zoey peered out of the bushes and scanned her surroundings one more time. Honestly, she would have preferred to remain hidden in the shrubs, possibly forever. But if there was actually an FBI agent on the island, then Zoey needed to do a thorough search of her father’s secret room and remove anything incriminating or encoded or just plain weird before Briggs could start poking around and jump to terrible conclusions.
If, Zoey thought, Dad hasn’t removed it all already.
Zoey’s nose started to tingle. She rolled her eyes skyward until the feeling faded.
She did not have time to sit in the bushes and cry about how unfair it was that she had to worry about whether her father was lying and what he could be lying about.
She waited five more minutes, then hurried to their backyard, dropped off her bike, and slipped inside the house. She rushed to her father’s bedroom, heaved the dresser aside, unlocked the door, and held her breath, desperately hoping that the combination would still work—and it did, thank God, and maybe that meant her father wasn’t a terrible person or unforgivably weird or hiding something unforgivable, and that he did still love her, even if she had stolen his book, thank God, thank God.
Muttering a prayer of gratitude to the universe, Zoey climbed down the stairs. The carpeted walls swallowed away all sound. She switched on the desk lamp, then the computer. Next she opened the voice recorder on her phone, set it on the desk, and started searching the room.
“Hi, Future Zoey, this is Past Zoey,” she announced. “I’m looking through Dad’s secret room and I’m going to tell you all about it, so I don’t forget anything. And also because it’s super creepy down here, and I like the sound of my own voice. So.” She crouched by a stack of plastic tubs against the wall, tried to move them, couldn’t. Way too heavy. She found an old wooden chair, climbed onto the seat, opened the topmost crate.
“Ammunition,” Zoey said. “Bullets and shit I know nothing about. Great. Awesome. Closing that immediately.”
On a set of metal shelves: “About a million cans of beans and vegetables and fruit. Also, SPAM. Gross.”
Hanging on the wall: “Also, the guns. We can’t forget the guns. Five of them. Super. Fantastic.”
She returned to the desk and opened each drawer.
“Top drawers are just pens and notepads and tools,” Zoey dictated. “A hammer, screwdrivers, wires.” She sighed sharply. “I’m gonna be really pissed if he’s building a bomb.”
She moved to the deeper bottom drawers.
“Hanging file folders,” she said, thumbing through the nearest ones. “They’re packed with newspaper clippings, and some printed online articles. Each file’s labeled with a year. Not every year, there are gaps. And they go back to . . .”
She squinted at the last folder. “1923? 1929, 1935, 1941 . . . Wait. I know these dates.”
Then she saw the folder labeled 1975, and the spinning pieces of her mind settled and calmed.
1975. The year Evelyn Sinclair had disappeared.
She glanced through the other folders, scanning quickly.
“1986,” she whispered. There it was. “Fiona Rochester.” 1994? Yes. “Avani Mishra.” And 2002? Grace Kang?
She pulled the folder labeled 2002 from the drawer, laid it on the desk, opened it. A stark newspaper headline stared back at her:
BELOVED TEEN DISAPPEARS FROM IDYLLIC SAWKILL ROCK.
“Grace,” Zoey whispered, running her fingers lightly across the black-and-white photo of a beaming Grace Kang in her Sawkill Day School graduation robes. Zoey had seen the photo a hundred times while researching the missing Sawkill girls. Another copy of it was pinned to the hidden bulletin board under her mattress.
She collected all the folders from the drawer and stacked them on the desk.
“So, Future Zoey,” she said after a moment. “It’s not weird for my dad to have these files, right? He’s the police chief. Of course he would want to research this stuff. Obviously. Naturally. But then . . .” She approached the desk slowly. “There’s this map. Not just of Sawkill, but the entire world.”
She stared at it for a long time, then felt like kicking something, because staring at the map did nothing to illuminate the reason for it. She stalked around the room, pointedly ignoring the guns hanging on the walls. What could she do with the guns? It wasn’t illegal to own them, unfortunately, unless some of these were truly illegal weapons, but how was she supposed to know that? Regardless, it certainly didn’t look good, to have a secret underground room filled with guns. Zoey couldn’t imagine Agent Briggs would be particularly pleased.
She marched back to the desk, and then she saw the black book, sitting beside the computer.
She really didn’t have time to peruse the book. She needed to take it, and the files, and the freaky red map, and whatever else she could carry, and burn them all, and throw the ashes into the sea. Then if Briggs found the room, her father would just look like a plain old survivalist. Nothing strange or encoded to be found.
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