The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  PRAISE FOR

  THE ONLY CHILD

  “A seductive Gothic thriller for the modern age. Crafted with dark intrigue and cinematic drive, this mesmerizing journey into the heart of a monster is, at once, compelling, eerie, and brilliantly satisfying.”

  Ami McKay, author of The Witches of New York

  “A darkly entrancing tale that sweeps you off your feet from its first pages. Filled with deliriously clever nods to the grand Gothic tradition, The Only Child is also fiercely original, wildly provocative, and utterly satisfying, beginning to end.”

  Megan Abbott, bestselling author of You Will Know Me

  “Cleverly re-imagines the nineteenth-century gothic classics while spinning a thrilling, touching, and distinctly twenty-first-century monster story.”

  Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

  “As much a psychological inquiry as it is an adrenaline-fueled thriller, layered with menace, mystery, and startling revelations that span centuries. A book that begs to be read in one sitting, with the doors locked, the lights low, and a sharp knife and a jug of holy water within reach, just in case.”

  Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon

  “So you’re reading The Only Child, Pyper’s newest book, and suddenly—kaboom!—the story is shot like a cannon blast across a very dark sky. Exactly the sort of light we pine for.”

  Josh Malerman, author of Black Mad Wheel

  PRAISE FOR

  THE DEMONOLOGIST

  “Smart, thrilling, and utterly unnerving. Pyper’s gift is that he deeply respects his readers, yet still insists on reducing them to quivering children. I like that in a writer.”

  Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Gone Girl

  PRAISE FOR

  THE DAMNED

  “A master of psychological suspense.”

  Lisa Gardner

  “Pyper has more than mastered the art. . . . The Damned guarantees many sleepless nights.”

  The Globe and Mail

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  To Heidi, Maude, and Ford

  Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? . . . Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

  —Bram Stoker, Dracula

  PART 1

  * * *

  The New World

  1

  * * *

  She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.

  Lily knows better than most how unlikely it is that this is real. Through her years of training and now her days in the courtroom providing expert testimony on psychological states of mind, she has learned how shaky the recollections of children can be. And she was only six when it happened. The age when certain things get stuck in the net of real memory, and other things you try to sell yourself on having happened but are in fact made up, turned into convincing bits of dream.

  What is verifiably known is that Lily was small for her age, green-eyed, her straight black hair snarled into a nest. The sole survivor. And there was the body, of course. Her mother’s.

  She rereads the documents the authorities submitted the same way others return to old love letters or family photo albums, tracing the outlines of faces. It’s an act of remembrance, but something more too. She’s looking for the missing link. Because though the coroner and police reports seem decisive enough, plausible enough, she can see all the ways the facts were stretched to connect to other facts with long strings of theory in between. It was a story assembled to close a file. A terrible, but not unprecedented, northern tale of an animal attack: a creature of considerable size—a bear, almost certainly, drawn by scents of cooked meat and human sweat—had forced its way into their cabin a couple hundred miles short of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and torn her mother apart, leaving Lily undiscovered in her bedroom, where she’d hidden from the screams.

  Acceptable on the face of it, as such stories are designed to be. Yet there was so much that wasn’t known it made for a narrative that collapsed upon itself at the merest prodding. Why, for instance, had the bear not eaten her mother? Where could it have gone that the hunters who went after it only a day later failed to find its tracks?

  The most puzzling part was how she made it out of the woods.

  Three miles to the only road that led, after a two-hour drive, to Fairbanks. The trail to the cabin a set of muddy ruts in summer, but in the subzero depths of February impossible to reach except by snowmobile, and her mother’s Kawasaki remained untouched at the site. When and why did she eventually leave the cabin? How did she get through the woods all on her own?

  The year she turned thirty Lily spent her summer vacation conducting an investigation of her own. She traveled north to see the cabin for herself and walked from the site through an aspen forest to the rusting trailer her mother had called their “secret place.” She spoke with all the people she could find who were mentioned in the reports.

  That was how she came to meet one of the hunters who’d assisted on the case. An old man by the time she took a seat next to the bed where he lay in an old-age home for Native Americans in Anchorage. A man old enough to have nothing to lose and grateful for the visit of a young woman.

  “My name is Lily,” she told him. “Lily Dominick? When I was a girl—”

  “I remember you.”

  “You do?”

  “The one the bear didn’t touch.” He shook his head with a kind of sad amusement, as if at the recollection of a practical joke gone wrong. “Except it wasn’t a bear.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Marks in the snow,” he answered, running his fingers through the air to indicate legs. “From the cabin to some birch about a quarter mile in. And not bear tracks either.”

  “That wasn’t in the report.”

  “It wouldn’t be. I told the dumb suit about it—the federal investigator—but he didn’t even bother looking because he said the snow had blown it clear. But I saw them fine. Not a machine, not snowshoes. Not boots.”

  “Then what?”

  He smiled and showed her the half dozen stumps of his teeth. “The closest thing? What I told the dumb suit? A horse.”

  “A horse,” Lily repeated. It wasn’t a question. It was to hear from her own mouth something at once impossible and deeply known.

  “The suits never put that in any of the write-ups. ‘To avoid embarrassment.’ Mine, I guess,” the old man said. “Because there’s no wild horses in Alaska. And no kept horse could have made it through snow that deep even if one had been hauled up that far. It couldn’t have gotten in, which means it couldn’t have gotten out.”

  It left the question of what happened to be answered by a hypothesis supported by a patchwork of forensics and animal behavior testimony. Lily had been of little help. Deemed unreliable given her age, and traumatized by the shock of losing her only parent. What made her version of events all the more dismissible was the obvious fantasy she’d created. She’d spoken of the dark outline of a ghoul bent over her mother’s form, followed by the appearance of a magical creature that carried her out of the bush on its back. Being a psychiatrist now, Lily knew it to be true: children made things up all the time, not only
for pleasure, but sometimes to survive.

  Even today she “remembers” things from that night. A handful of details recalled with the clarity of a lived event.

  She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.

  She thinks of it as this, as a monster, because she knows it wasn’t a bear. Because bears don’t knock before entering. Because the one difference between animals and people is that animals don’t murder, they hunt.

  Because she saw it.

  2

  * * *

  No matter the weather, Dr. Lily Dominick walks to work every day. Up Second Avenue from her apartment and across the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge to the broad flats of playing fields and institutional campuses of Randalls Island. From there, the most direct way to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center would be to follow the service road that runs beneath the interstate, but Lily keeps to the river instead, sharing the pathway with only the most serious runners and a handful of bored nannies pushing strollers. It takes a little longer, but she always arrives early. There is nothing in her life to make her late.

  On this morning, a blue-domed October wonder, she stops to take in the island of Manhattan she can’t help but see, from this south-facing perspective, as a primary school class picture arranged according to height: the stubby apartment buildings and anonymous housing projects growing into the show-offy towers of Midtown. Yet it’s not the view that holds her. She looks across the churning water at the smallest building of them all—right up front, where she was made to stand surrounded by strangers in the classroom pictures of her youth—and tries to assess herself as she might the accused she puts questions to at work.

  Why is the cabin with you today?

  Because of my dream last night.

  The old dream. The one you haven’t had in years.

  It’s been a while, yes.

  The dream of riding a white horse through the woods after your mother died?

  Not died. Killed. And I don’t think it was a dream. I don’t think it was a horse.

  Even now? You still think it actually happened? You still believe in magic?

  Lily doesn’t have an answer for these last questions. Which makes her like most of her clients. They can tell you what they saw, how they did it, what arguments the voices in their heads made. But whether any of it was real? It’s like asking a child if the thing living under their bed is real.

  She has a gift for the job. One that goes beyond her exceptional performances on exams and the workaholism that was mistaken for ambition but was in fact the comfort she felt walking the asylum’s halls. She finds a music in the shouted obscenities and hellish moans emitted from the cells. And then there are the clients themselves. Mutilators, stalkers, worshippers of their own churches of the occult. Malignant souls that most, including her colleagues, largely regard as beyond understanding. Yet Lily doesn’t see them that way. She can enter the burnt forests and rubbled cities of their minds and find the pathway to their intentions, the core of their wants buried under ash and rock.

  “Why did you do it?” she asks as the final query in most of her interviews.

  “I don’t know,” the murderer or rapist replies.

  “I do,” Lily says.

  She starts walking again, toward the pale brick walls of the Kirby ahead of her, its plainness and enormity not even trying to hide the madhouse that it is. Most of the people she works with, the social workers and orderlies, regularly call the building ugly, or as one bow-tied district attorney who repeatedly hits on her and she repeatedly denies likes to put it, “the Pandemonium on Hell Gate Circle.” Lily couldn’t disagree more. It was true that where she worked was the sort of place you never wanted to end up. That’s why she thought it architecturally honest for it to appear that way. It looked like hell for a reason.

  There were so many other positions Lily could have pursued, cushy appointments where she’d refer violent offenders to public institutions like the Kirby but wouldn’t have to deal with them directly. Safe and sound. But that was never what she was looking for. It was satisfying to find something you had an affinity for in a university lecture hall, but once she arrived at the Kirby she found it electrifying to practice it in the field. Lily had a special talent for hearing echoes of the demonic voices in the thoughts of her clients, a kind of empathy that her supervisor, Dr. Edmundston, believed marked her for even greater success than she’d already enjoyed in her first few years out, though he admitted that it frightened him a little sometimes. It frightened Lily a little sometimes too. But although the Kirby represented the grimiest corner of psychiatric work, Lily found everything she needed in it. She took home more than enough money for a single woman in a less-than-great apartment who doesn’t go out much. And she had never wanted the work to be safe.

  You couldn’t admit to it, it was unprofessional, it was wrong, but Lily finds stimulation, something almost like arousal, in glimpsing the most diseased minds. It’s like looking over the edge of a cliff. If you get close enough, you can feel what it would be like to take one more step and have the world slip out from under you.

  A runner rushes toward her.

  One of the gaunt marathoners who circle the city’s edges day and night. Usually they pass without noticing she’s there. But this one, a woman with dark hair tied into a braid that lashes against one shoulder and then the other with each stride, looks directly at her.

  There were only a couple of photos ever taken as far as she knew, waxy squares issued from the lips of Polaroid cameras. Pictures of a woman she would compare her own likeness to and sometimes see herself, sometimes not. But as the running woman glances back as she passes, Lily recognizes her.

  The running woman looks exactly like her mother.

  3

  * * *

  What are you? Some kind of psycho?

  Dr. Lily Dominick punches in her security code at the staff entrance as she mentally edits the indictment that has ticker-taped through her mind.

  What are you? Some kind—

  Some kind of what?

  How would the assistant director of Forensic Psychiatry at one of the leading maximum security institutions of its kind diagnose herself? She knows where to start, anyway. Symptoms. First, a dream from the night before involving her rescue on the back of a white beast. This morning, the memory of a monster as it stood in a pool of blood on the threshold of the cabin’s door. And just now, the hallucination of her mother in the face of a stranger.

  She can’t do it. It’s impossible for Lily to see herself as a client because there’s no question in her mind that she is fundamentally sane. Given to anxiety in social situations, emotionally more reserved than she ought to be, functionally asexual for longer stretches than she’d like to dwell on, but clinically normal. These visions are only indicative of her imaginative character, she tells herself, not a disorder in the pages of her bible, Forensic Mental Health Assessment, Second Edition.

  It isn’t me, Lily thinks as the door buzzes open and she steps inside the Kirby’s walls. Something in the world has changed today.

  Something that’s here. Inside.

  * * *

  SHE SQUEAKS DOWN THE MARBLE floor in the leather flats she traded her sneakers for in a bathroom stall. Choosing comfort over the additional inch or two that heels might afford her, Lily stands five foot four with her back straight. She’s little not just in terms of height but proportionally: the slender fingers, the narrow hips, the elven ears. All her life she’s been described as petite, a word she’s come to hate the whole French language for. Yet she’s aware of making choices that play up to a certain version of the part. The crisply tailored suits, round tortoiseshell glasses, pageboy haircut. She is at once compact and severe, the sort of woman who men and other women alike tend to call “intense.” But there was something enticing in her brand of intensity, something many others saw even if she was blind to it herself. If not an invitation, she offered the promise of a remarkable discovery, a surprising gift to be shared if yo
u could find the key that unlocked her.

  As she nods good morning to passing coworkers she gets into the elevator that will take her to her office, all the while telling the second voice within her to be quiet. The voice belongs to her, but is distinct from her own. It’s that nasty inner devil all of us have—so Lily believes, a sentimental Freudian at heart—that requires regular taming. Inappropriate. You’d never guess it was there, this other voice, coming from this other part of her, manic and grinning within her.

  Lily pulls open the door to the cramped anteroom where her assistant Denise’s desk is surrounded by towering filing cabinets and a sad chair with a crater in the seat. One look tells Lily that Denise has news. That expression of hers that announces there’s something especially juicy to be shared. Her brows raised and her filigreed earrings swinging from recently shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Do me a favor and stand here a second,” she says as she hands Lily a case file. “I want to see your face when you read what this one did.”

  “Can’t we even try to say good morning first?”

  “You’re the one who’s going to have the good morning. Go on, read it.”

  “You know these files are confidential, right?”

  “I can keep a secret.” Denise zips her lips shut.

  Lily looks down at the file and sees there’s no name on the identification label on the front, only a number. It’s not uncommon for clients to show up without knowing who they are, or without telling the police if they do. But this file feels different. A vibrating warmth that travels through the stiff paper and into her fingertips.

  “What did he do?” Lily asks.

  Denise gets up from her chair to whisper. “Tell you the truth, I don’t want to say.”