Zoey glared at the book, fear plugging her throat. “How am I supposed to know what’s suspicious and what isn’t?” she whispered to her dutifully recording phone. “How am I supposed to know if I can trust him?”
A thought she couldn’t bear to voice: What if he’s involved with something terrible?
Am I daughter, then, or am I citizen?
“Do I tell Briggs about all of this?” she muttered, sitting down at the desk and opening the book. “And what do I even tell him?” She started flipping through the pages of Latin text, past the first set of Collector illustrations, then past another dozen or so pages of text, and then landed on another collection of illustrations. These were meticulously rendered human figures: a white girl with pigtails, a black man wearing an old-fashioned tailored suit, a freckled man wearing overalls, an Asian woman in a beautiful flapper-style gown.
The illustrations grew darker and less faded as Zoey kept turning the pages, as though some had been recently added. And they all had one small detail in common:
Their eyes were round and white, like tiny headlights. No pupils. No irises.
Heart pounding, Zoey flipped back to the Collector drawings, just to check.
“Okay,” she said, snapping pictures. “Future Zoey, see what you make of this: both the monsters and the humans in this book all have the same eyes. Thora said the legend is that the Collector can assume different forms. So maybe these illustrations are of the different forms he can take?”
Zoey tried to imagine her father hunched over this book, underground in the dim lamplight, adding a sketch of a not-Marion with white eyes, and felt like she could quite possibly throw up.
She flipped the page, came across a chunk of pages filled top to bottom with cramped lines of Latin. Throughout the text were drawings, diagrams. Sketches of . . .
She peered closely, tilted the book toward the light, and saw a girl in scratchy silhouette. The girl carried a sword, her other arm thrust out with a rigid palm. A phrase scribbled beside her read: SEMPER TRES.
Zoey exhaled sharply. She was so sick of all the Latin. The Latin was creepy. It was a language of the dead.
She took a photo of the sword girl, then was about to turn the page when she noticed two things, one right after the other:
Her eye caught on a tiny line of English text sandwiched between the Latin, lettered in ink a little darker and sharper than the rest:
There is such a thing as a tesseract.
Zoey’s blood crawled hot-cold just underneath her skin.
“‘There is such a thing as a tesseract,’” she whispered. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
It was a line from A Wrinkle in Time, the book her father had promised her he’d read, and, judging by the ink, this sentence had possibly been written recently.
A ping sounded from Zoey’s phone. She glanced over to see a text notification, from Marion:
i chose Thora because she was fascinated with me
Then, a second text:
i craved her obsession
And a third:
she tasted sublime
Val
The Distraction
Val followed her mother’s trim form up the running path from the Kingshead Woods back to the house. It was a tradition of theirs, these mother-daughter runs. Three mornings a week, six miles each, and no amount of missing girls or panicked neighbors would change that.
As they passed the Althouse cottage, running lightly in single file—her mother in the lead, always—Val thought to herself, Eyes front, Val. Just keep running. Eyes front.
But she couldn’t resist.
Mine.
She glanced right.
A canvas hammock stretched between two oak trees that grew on the cottage’s eastern lawn, and Marion and her mother, clinging to each other like two people lost at sea, lay inside it.
Val’s heart skipped sweetly along her ribs.
Her eyes flicked to her mother, then back to the hammock. The running path took them near enough for Val to hear that Marion was humming something, a song Val didn’t know.
Val’s mother waved at the Althouses. “I’ll come check on you after I shower!” she called out, gesturing at herself. It made Val cringe, that false bright note in her mother’s voice. Lucy Mortimer was not accustomed to being so chummy with the help, and it showed. “We’ll have lunch, all right?”
Marion waved at them as they passed. Mrs. Althouse had snuggled up beside her like a child. A book lay facedown on Marion’s stomach. She stroked her mother’s hair, graying where Marion’s was black as a starless night. Val wondered what it would feel like, to be curled up beside Marion’s safe, solid body like that, and talk for hours, hiding nothing, pretending nothing.
She wondered if Marion also couldn’t stop thinking about the previous night in the barn. If, in Val’s arms, Marion had felt as seen and obvious and expansive and fully realized as Val had in hers.
Then Val’s stomach lurched.
A cruel inner fist punched her ribs before plummeting down to slam against her pelvis.
Val stumbled over a tree root, and coughed, gasping for breath.
Her mother caught her by the arm.
“Was that him?” she asked, a slight tremor in her voice.
Val nodded. She touched her neck; her throat burned, like she’d recently gotten sick. “Yes,” she whispered, “but I don’t know why.”
A lie. She suspected why: he’d noticed her noticing Marion.
Or, he knew what Marion had done, and he knew Val had seen it, too. And he wondered why she had yet to say anything to him about it.
Her mother, expressionless, shook Val free and ran ahead, as if it were imperative to put distance between them. Val did not look back at Marion, but she felt the pull of her all the way up the hill and into Kingshead, like the call of a warm bed after an endless winter.
Marion
The Other
Marion hadn’t slept all night.
Instead, she sat on the floor beside her bed and acclimated herself to the moth.
Since she’d somehow appeared back in her room, sweaty and aching and doubting her own sanity, the moth hadn’t left her side. She’d crawled to the bathroom, not wanting to dirty the floor, cleaned off her feet in the bathtub, and applied bandages to every scrape, then put on a pair of clean socks and hobbled back down the hallway.
The moth followed, fluttering unevenly beside her shoulder. When she returned to her spot on the floor next to her bed, the moth alighted on her knee. Its wings sighed open and closed like paper-thin lungs.
At first Marion thought: I will smack this moth off my leg, like I would any bug. I will crush it under my palm and toss it in the toilet.
But if she did that, she would be left alone, with no one and nothing else who understood that she had transported herself from the forest to the cliffs to an alien beach and back to her bedroom.
She said it aloud, the words feeling fat and unfamiliar on her tongue:
“Something’s happening to me.” Instead of smacking away the moth, she extended a finger. “Do you know what it is?”
The moth climbed aboard. Where it stepped, tiny coins of warmth bloomed on Marion’s clammy skin. She raised her finger so she could look at the moth’s eyes. Rimmed with white fur, they stared black and unblinking at her.
Marion watched them until her frantic heartbeat slowed.
Then she laughed, tears rising fast. “I’m talking to a moth.” She lowered her finger. Agreeably, the moth fluttered onto her knee. “I’m losing my mind.”
She climbed into bed, desperate for sleep. Sleep would cleanse her brain of the images she couldn’t erase—the Mortimers’ horse running with its broken leg and then throwing itself over the cliffs. The snowy beach. The smoking piles of bones.
But when Marion closed her eyes, that was all she could see. She tried for hours, but she couldn’t quiet her brain, and her bed felt like stones under her sore limbs.
At last she opened her eyes and
saw the moth perched across the room on her desk chair. Watching her.
“All right,” Marion said. It was late morning, nearly noon. She sat up, returned to the floor. The moth floated down to meet her. Marion waited until it touched her knee, then nodded and took a long, steady breath. Trapped in her throat was a hysterical laugh, which made steady breathing difficult. But whatever. Never mind.
“Doesn’t matter,” she whispered. She thought of the snow-covered, sand-covered beach. The strange amber water, the lavender sky.
How had she gotten there the first time?
She glanced at the moth. “Do I have to go scare another horse or something?”
For answer, the moth began cleaning its antennae with its furry front legs.
Marion sighed. “Great. Helpful.”
She leaned against the footboard of her bed. The thin metal post dug into her back, and with a jolt she remembered the electrical charge that had surged up from the ground and slapped her between her shoulder blades. It had told her to run after the charging horse. It had told her, Go.
She looked back at the moth. “Do you know what that was? What it means?”
The moth stared, its wings quivering so fast they became a blur. The slight whisper of wing against wing made words Marion couldn’t understand.
She closed her eyes, her heart drumming fast, trying to re-create the previous night—how the air had felt against her skin, what frantic thoughts had blazed through her mind, what emotions had seized her as she watched the horse stagger.
Memory pictures formed behind her eyes—the black forest, the black night, the salt in the air, the crash of nearing waves, the horse’s terrified cry.
A buzz tingled Marion’s bare legs. The fibers of the rug itched and scratched. Sawkill Rock stretched vast and unmovable beneath her, but Marion was not afraid of it. Its existence was a comfort. It was a seal basking belly-up in the water. It was ancient and tired and it reached up for Marion’s legs with tender tendrils, like a song traveling on invisible currents.
How had Charlotte described it, that first day on the ferry?
It’s like this . . . this thing, perched out there on the water.
The bone cry arose, faintly, like the sound of approaching traffic—power, contained and far away, but coming up fast.
Marion welcomed the sound. She imagined her body opening to receive it. She was not a girl of dense muscle and clumsy bones. She was a network of air-filled tubes, of inflating balloons. She was a symphony warming up before the big night.
The moth fluttered away, leaving Marion’s knee cold. She had the sudden, unshakable feeling that the Rock was watching her. Against the glass of her window tapped a branch from the fat oak tree outside.
“Hello?” Marion whispered.
The charge humming along the rug detonated, zipped up her spine, and planted itself at the base of her skull. The world shifted, like a cube squeezing through another cube to emerge whole and immense on the other side. Marion’s breath caught in her throat, trapped between realities.
She opened her eyes.
She was no longer in her bedroom, nor was she on a foreign beach with cities in the sky.
She was downstairs, in her kitchen, on the breakfast table, of all places, beside the fruit bowl. In front of her was the window over the sink, which looked out over the twin giant oak trees and the hammock and, beyond, Kingshead.
Marion sat, legs crossed, trying to catch her breath. The hair on her arms stood up; the old static-balloon trick. The bone cry remained, shriller now, discordant. Urgent.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry. “What the hell.”
A woman’s voice called out from outside: “I’ll come check on you after I shower! We’ll have lunch, all right?”
Then the moth appeared, diving down from the ceiling to thump against the window—again, and again, and again.
At first Marion just stared at it. The moth, the trees, the sea, the horse.
Sawkill Rock.
Disparate pieces? Or one and the same?
The back of Marion’s neck still tingled from where the charge had hit her.
She scrambled off the table and hit her knee on a chair. “Stop!” She raised her cupped hands, moved them between the moth and the glass. The moth climbed up her fingers and pressed its antennae against the window.
Marion followed its gaze:
First, Val and her mother, jogging up the running path toward Kingshead.
Oh, Val. Marion tried to remain unmoved by the sight of Val—her hair in a long golden braid, her arm muscles glistening with sweat, her face bright and open. Val was not to be trusted. Val was a mark.
But Marion couldn’t help it; heat floated up her body to greet her fingertips. Everyone thinks I live this charmed life, Val had said, just before Marion had kissed her, her eyes luminous with tears, but the truth is . . .
What, Val? Marion should have said. Tell me your truth.
Marion’s mother lay beyond Val, sleeping in the hammock. And beside her . . .
The bone cry’s crescendo smacked Marion in the chest like a hammer.
Beside her mother was Marion herself. Stroking her mother’s hair, holding her close, gazing furiously after Val.
The world slowed. The moth fluttered at Marion’s ear.
Zoey’s words returned to her: Not-Marion.
Marion slammed her hands against the window, screamed, “Mom! Wake up!”
The not-Marion in the hammock sat up, whipped her head around to stare. In the glare of the sun, her eyes flashed round and white.
She jumped out of the hammock, nearly sending Mrs. Althouse toppling to the ground, and ran for the woods.
Marion
The Message
Marion grabbed the car keys from the wall hook and burst out of the house. She flew down the porch steps so fast she fell off the bottom one, skinning her knee on the pavement. She pushed herself up and ran for the hammock. Her tender feet were on fire.
“Mom! Get up!”
Her mother was looking around, dazed, her cheek pink from sleeping with it pressed against not-Marion’s shoulder. She squinted at Marion. “Marion? You nearly knocked me over.”
“Come on, get up.” Marion heaved her mother out of the hammock. “Faster, let’s go.”
“Marion!” Her mother pulled against Marion’s grip. “What’s wrong with you? Where are we going?”
“Mom, move your feet,” Marion cried. Limping, she pushed her mother down the hill toward the station wagon, and looked back over her shoulder toward the woods—just trees, no doppelgängers.
Mrs. Althouse let out a frightened sob. “You’re scaring me, sweetie, slow down!”
Marion opened the passenger-side door and shoved her mother toward it. “Please, get in. Close the door and lock it.”
Then Marion limped around to the driver’s side, looking up once more at the woods. A movement at the corner of her eye—the front doors of Kingshead opening, revealing a slim golden figure. Val? Or her mother?
Marion jumped into the car, turned the key in the ignition, floored the gas pedal.
“Marion?” Her mom was staring at her, clinging to the door as if prepared to jump out if necessary. “What’s going on? What did you see?”
Marion spoke into her phone—“Call Zoey”—and sped down the drive.
She watched the road ahead. She didn’t dare look into the trees on either side.
Twenty agonizing minutes later, after dropping off her mother at the police station—which crawled with both staff and volunteers—Marion reached the Harlows’ house.
“Zoey?” She jumped out of the car, limped toward the porch. She had called Zoey thirteen times during the drive, but Zoey had never picked up. Marion hadn’t been able to stop scratching her skin. Her forearms stung, branded from elbow to wrist with red nail marks.
The house’s front door flew open. Zoey marched down the steps to meet Marion in the driveway, and Marion laughed through her tears.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed, reaching out for a hug.
Zoey shoved her away and held out her phone. “What the fuck is this, Marion?”
Marion stared at the screen: her own name, their text conversation. She read the three latest messages once, then twice, and took a step back from the phone as if it had struck her.
i chose Thora because she was fascinated with me
i craved her obsession
she tasted sublime
“I didn’t send those,” Marion said at once.
Zoey’s eyes were bright with tears. “This is sick. You’re sick. This isn’t funny.”
“I swear, I didn’t send them!” Marion pulled up their text chain on her own phone, ready to show Zoey that those messages were fake, that they’d been sent by someone else—but then Marion saw the letters staring back at her from her own screen, just as they’d looked on Zoey’s:
she tasted sublime
“Holy shit,” Marion whispered. She felt like she was teetering on the edge of a fatal drop. “They’re here. They’re in my phone.”
“Right,” said Zoey. “Because you sent them.”
“I didn’t! Please, I . . .” Marion scrolled uselessly through her phone, trying to find something, anything, to prove her innocence. “I didn’t send them. I didn’t. I don’t know who did, but it wasn’t me.” She shook her head, burst into breathless tears. “Zoey, please, I . . . I saw her. The not-Marion. She was with my mom. She saw me, and her eyes changed. They were white; they flashed. She ran into the woods, and I grabbed my mom and drove away, brought her to the police station.”
Marion tried to slip her phone back into her pocket, but her hands were shaking, so she could barely manage it. “I don’t know what’s happening. The horse. Last night, I . . . Jesus, Zoey, I don’t know what to do.”
Zoey watched her through narrowed eyes, then pulled up an image on her own phone and held it up.
“Did her eyes look like this?” she asked.
Sawkill Girls Page 17