Brooke’s eyes struggled to focus. He’d hit her hard. Behind him, she thought she could see the door of the root cellar yawning wide. He must have gotten in through the outer hatch.
There were sounds of movement from the bedroom.
Brooke tried to stand. The air resisted her. Cawley raised the hammer again. It was coming down. She fell to her knees, and the hammer swung past her.
“Stop!” Milo was there, jumping down the stairs three at a time.
Brooke remembered that the rifle was upstairs. She tried to form words, but her tongue was thick and slow. Tried again to stand, and fell sideways. Hot pain blazed in her ear. She raised her hand, and it came away slick with blood.
Milo was swinging something. The iron skillet. Pancakes, she thought. Had she said that out loud? Then she thought, Brain damage. I have brain damage.
She registered a sound—metal on metal—and the hammer skidded past her on the floor. It was near her foot. She pictured herself reaching for it, lifting it, but her arms would not obey. Her legs seemed to work, though, so she kicked it and it disappeared down into the open root cellar. There, she thought.
A clattering sound. Cawley was rifling in the cutlery drawer. It came too far out and fell.
A frightened yelp from upstairs. The kids.
Brooke crawled toward the stairs, moving more and more slowly, as if against a sucking tide. She reached the cookstove. Her head wouldn’t stay up. She kept landing on her face. She turned onto her back and felt for the iron base of the cookstove with her foot.
She saw Milo take another swing with the skillet, but Cawley had a paring knife now and Milo had to jump back, out of the way. Cawley lunged past him, going for Brooke on the floor. He came down with the knife. She blocked him at the wrist, but the deflection was weak and she felt the blade cut deep into her forearm.
The pain gave her a brief rush of energy. As Cawley was recoiling with the knife, she reached up for his remaining stubs of hair, pulled him toward her, and dodged at the last second, letting his skull crack against the floor. He rolled away from her.
She felt again for the leg of the cookstove. If she couldn’t walk, she’d have to slide to the stairs. She had to get to the girls, to the rifle.
Her sock foot found purchase on smooth iron. She pushed with all the strength she had, propelling herself across the gritty floor. Then she was falling. She had botched the angle and, instead of hitting the base of the stairs, had sent herself through the open trapdoor. The rungs of the ladder caught her spine, and she slammed against an earthen floor.
Sounds of scraping and crashing from the kitchen above her, and, farther off, a scream from the bedroom.
“Holly,” Brooke cried. It came out as a whisper.
She had to get to them. She had to climb.
Instead, somehow, it seemed as if she was sinking farther down. She peered through a narrowing tunnel, darkness creeping in from the corners of her vision, as the moonlit square of the trapdoor got smaller and smaller, receding in the distance.
“Holly—”
It was gone. Darkness. Silence. The texture of the ground underneath her had changed. Instead of cold earth, she was lying on something soft—moss? Impossible. Yet when she put her hands down to push herself up, it was the live springiness of moss that she felt.
She blinked, and gasped. In the instant that her eyes closed, it was as if she’d opened them; the world lit up in front of her—but the wrong world: a green forest, moss under her hands, sunlight, and birdsong.
She opened her eyes and blackness closed around her. She had to wake up, climb the ladder, get to the girls. Brooke closed her eyes again, brushing her eyelashes to be sure, and the strange scene reappeared. She pinched the inside of her arm, and it hurt like a bee sting, but the forest remained.
“I don’t want to be here,” she said, looking desperately around at the forest as if she might find a doorway back to her life hidden among the trees.
The only thing she saw was a notebook, lying open on the ground.
She leaned closer. The page showed a drawing of a woman lying on moss, under a tree. Brooke recognized herself: tangled hair, blue jeans, yellow sweatshirt. In the drawing, she carried a pistol in a hip holster and her belly was flat, her waist cinched.
Brooke touched her stomach reflexively. It was normal, her same doughy belly. Now she noticed that her pain was gone. The backache from days of walking and riding and carrying a pack, gone. The pain in her ear, where Cawley had struck her, the cut in her arm, her blistered feet, the ache of her separated shoulder, all gone.
“This isn’t real,” she said. Her mind wasn’t working right. She had to wake up. She had to go back. She needed something to hold on to.
She lifted the notebook, and it fell open to a different page. She saw more images of herself. The drawings were sectioned off in squares like a comic book. In the second-to-last drawing, Brooke held a smoking pistol and Cawley lay dead on the ground.
“That isn’t what happened,” she told the notebook, turning to the front page. There she was, looking out over the cranberry bogs, the morning sky blushing pink. In the next frame, she stood in the door of the washing shed as a hand reached out from the darkness and clamped over her mouth. Her eyes in the drawing were wide with terror.
She flipped the pages: the sheriff, the Legion, the swamp. Some scenes were as they had happened; others were wrong. In the picture of the duck blind, Stephen Cawley sat bound, watching Brooke. Behind his back, he was folding a sharp rock into his palm. She turned the page: Emily, running toward a blazing barn in place of the drive shed, looking shocked, hair in a tidy, maternal bun, no shotgun in her hands. On the next page, Milo and the girls in the yard of the Holland farm, in daylight, the house behind them undamaged.
The texture of the drawings under Brooke’s fingers felt real. The paper was waxy and smooth where someone had pressed in with colored pencil. The faces of Holly and Sal, though inexpertly drawn, were Holly’s and Sal’s faces.
Brooke shook her head. Holly and Sal were in danger. All Cawley had to do was get past Milo and up the stairs. She stood, and her dizziness from the kitchen was gone.
Now she became aware of a house at the edge of the trees. It was gray, sprawling, many-windowed. The door was open, and Brooke could see that the house was shallow: across a single room, a second door stood open on the other side, and someone was sitting there, looking out.
Brooke made her way silently over the mossy forest floor. At the door of the house, she hesitated, unsure why she was reluctant to enter. It was a man, she saw now. An old man, sitting with his back to her. There was an empty chair next to him. Beyond, the lawn dropped away.
No . . . Brooke looked closer: the lawn was dissolving into mist. The house, the grass, the bit of forest Brooke had just come from—she saw now that they comprised an island surrounded by encroaching whiteness. Even as Brooke watched, a willow tree was overtaken, thinned, erased.
She was running out of time. She had to get back. She had to wake up.
She forced herself through the doorway, across the room, toward the man in the chair. Iron-gray hair combed over a thinning patch on top. Wide, heavy shoulders—a body made for movement, conspicuous in its stillness. The size and weight of him in all things.
Laughable to have believed him dead. As likely the earth itself should die.
“Who’s that?” Edmund Holland leaned forward and turned to see who was behind him.
He was older. In fact, Brooke realized, he was older than he should have been. He looked to be in his eighties, when he wouldn’t yet have reached sixty-five. A child’s pack of pencil crayons poked from his pocket.
“Did you do the drawings, Daddy?” Brooke asked, hearing how silly it sounded. Edmund’s hands had done many things in life—built, worked, wrecked; never drawn.
“It came this morning, all this,” Edmund said, forgoing greetings as Brooke had done. He waved at the whiteness beyond the grass. “The dog went into it and didn�
��t come back when I called. She always comes when I call. And then I couldn’t remember her name. It’s like that with everything. I had a family. Now I can’t remember their faces.”
“You’re dead,” Brooke told Edmund. “You’re not real.”
“Faulty logic,” he pronounced. “Which is it?”
“If you’re dead, why am I here too?”
“Put it together, daughter. What could that possibly mean?”
“No,” Brooke said, shaking her head.
“Death comes to everyone. You know that.”
“Milo and the kids are still back there.”
“It would seem that such partings are not forever.”
Brooke stared out at the mist. If Cawley killed her family, would they come here? Was Emily here somewhere? Anita, Callum, Aaron? Brooke looked out over the lawn, wishing for them to appear and dreading it in equal measure.
The drifting mist was peaceful. The pain was gone. She wasn’t waking up.
Brooke sat down in the empty chair, the notebook loose in her hand. The green smell of forest all around her. The wall of nothing had advanced a few more feet across the lawn, bisecting a hedge. There was no sign that another world even existed.
In the drawings in the notebook, Milo and the girls were safe. Brooke had killed Cawley and the story was over. Was that it? Her real life erased, just like that?
“Why did you bring me here?” Brooke asked hopelessly. “What do you want? Do you want me to apologize? You think I’m not sorry for what happened?”
“You had everything you needed,” Edmund replied. “We gave you everything you needed. Yet you abandoned us.”
“No, Daddy,” Brooke said. “You’re the ones who disappeared. It’s only me who survived.”
“Let’s not forget the marshmallow,” Edmund said, and Brooke saw something, she thought—a glimmer of love, maybe, inside the malice.
Brooke looked at the notebook in her hands. The last drawing was of her in the forest. One blank page remained. Brooke stared at the stippled whiteness of the paper as if there might be some image hidden there, some clue to what was happening in the world she’d disappeared from.
It didn’t bear wondering if she was dreaming, stuck unconscious back in that root cellar, dying, dead. She knew she hadn’t killed Cawley. The danger was not past.
“Help me, Daddy,” she said. “It didn’t go like in these pictures. I have to go back. If you brought me here, then whatever you did, undo it. Send me back. Draw a door. Back there in the trees, the same place I came from.”
“Ah, yes,” Edmund said with contempt. “Back to the old world. Why adapt when you can degrade?”
“I don’t want to hear it, Daddy,” she said, shoving the notebook into his lap. “My kids are in trouble. Draw the door.”
Edmund sighed and took the box of colored pencils from his pocket. Brooke watched him draw.
“It was better the way I had it,” he said when the page was done.
Brooke took it from his hands.
“You don’t get to decide anymore,” she said.
Edmund stared at her for a moment, and then his eyes slipped past her, to the mist.
“Goodbye, Daddy,” Brooke said. She passed through the house, over the lawn, back to the woods.
At the place where the door was supposed to be, there was nothing.
Brooke looked at the notebook, checking the drawing. There was the low bush to her left, the two cedar trees beyond that. And where the door in the drawing was . . . Then she understood. The mist had already overtaken it. The place where the door should have been was gone. Or almost gone—Brooke could just see the corner of what could have been a doorframe, planted in the grass at the edge of the whiteness. She had taken it for a branch or a tree root.
She stepped to the threshold, facing nothing.
19
Brooke smelled dirt. A deep chill emanated from the packed-earth floor of the root cellar. She lay twisted where she’d fallen at the bottom of the ladder. Above the trapdoor was a square of moonlight. The pain was back, all of it: spine battered by the fall, ear throbbing where the hammer had landed, a hot sting in her forearm from Cawley’s knife, and her shoulder—old, aching companion.
The notebook was still in Brooke’s hand. She lifted it, and the trace of light that reached into the cellar showed her only a handful of newsprint, limp and faded.
There was a shout from the kitchen above.
Brooke gripped the first rung of the ladder and began to pull herself up. Her head swam. Everything went black again for a moment. Scuffling feet overhead. Something dragging across the floor.
Her vision cleared and she could see the trapdoor, the kitchen ceiling, the beam missing its fan. She tried to picture the string of actions in front of her, but the images bled together, dilated, splintered. Her head was all wrong. She tried again, caught one image, held it.
Reach.
Her hand closed around the next rung of the ladder. She drew a deep breath and forced her heavy, listing head upright.
Reach.
Her hand found another rung. With every pull, Brooke could see more of the kitchen: stovepipe, top of wall, cupboard.
More crashing in the room above. Another cry, abruptly cut off.
Reach.
Brooke was almost at the top. The commotion from the kitchen stopped, a sudden hush in its place. She heard only the sound of labored breathing.
Reach.
Brooke’s eyes cleared the level of the floor. Overturned chairs, cutlery scattered. Cawley was leaning against the table, holding Milo in front of him, the paring knife to his throat. They were both breathing heavily, standing perfectly still, their eyes fixed on a point high up, beyond Brooke.
She turned her head with difficulty. Holly was on the landing of the stairs, holding the rifle.
“Let him go,” Holly said.
A whimper from the top of the stairs: Sal, huddled behind the railing.
No one had noticed Brooke. The trapdoor was in the shadow of the staircase. She reached across the floorboards to the newel post at the base of the stairs. Pulled herself forward until her legs were out of the hole.
“You let him go,” Holly repeated. “I’ll count to three.”
“Come on,” Cawley said, his voice a ruined croak. “Put that down.”
Brooke told her body to stand, but it did not respond. She pictured the movement, piece by piece.
Knee.
She raised her knee in front of her.
Hand.
She gripped her knee.
Up.
She braced herself to rise.
“One,” Holly said.
Brooke pushed against her knee and was halfway to her feet when she was caught by another wave of vertigo. She swayed, falling roughly against the bannister.
Now they were all looking at her.
“Holly,” Brooke gasped. “Don’t do it, honey.”
“Listen to your mother,” Cawley said, his eyes darting from Brooke to Holly.
“Two,” Holly said. “And shut up, Mom.”
Brooke clung to the newel post and lurched awkwardly to the bottom step.
“Call her off, Brooke,” Cawley rasped. “Or I swear I’ll knife him.”
“Three.” Holly came down a step and leveled the rifle. The safety was off. Her grip was bad, Brooke saw, but not that bad. She might hit one of them.
“Hell,” Cawley muttered, ducking behind Milo for cover.
Brooke stabilized herself on hands and knees and climbed the second step.
“I mean it,” Holly said.
“Stephen,” Brooke begged as she fumbled her way up another step. “Please.”
“I never asked for this shit,” Cawley said, blinking, his smoke-damaged eyes leaking. “This fucking shit.”
“I know.” Brooke’s vision rocked. She was two steps below Holly. She reached out and touched her daughter’s foot. “We were just kids.”
Something went out of Cawley then. He cl
osed his eyes and slackened his arm. Milo reached up and moved the knife away from his throat. Cawley sank, knees buckling, and Milo twisted around and caught him, easing him into a chair.
BROOKE HAD A CONCUSSION—her head ached, her balance pitched and rolled, and she found herself phasing between moments, losing the spaces in between. One minute, she was on the landing with Holly, fumbling with shaky fingers to unload the rifle; the next, she was holding Sal in her lap at the top of the stairs, rocking her like a baby. Now, the girls were both out of reach, watching as Milo shined the flashlight in Brooke’s eyes, asking if she knew where she was. She tried to answer, but her lips were wet and blurry; instead of words, tears came. She wiped her cheeks.
“Mom,” Holly said, shocked.
“I’m sorry,” Brooke gulped.
“Is Mom okay?” Sal whispered.
Brooke’s attempts to stand only brought her down with head rush, so Milo helped her to the bed, and there she collapsed. Holly and Sal sat near her, tapping the backs of her hands to keep her awake until dawn lit the frost-feathered window.
Brooke watched daylight grow in her parents’ bedroom and puzzled over what had happened to bring her here. Memories of their journey came to her out of order, a spill of images and feelings, terror and raw eggs and blank snow. She couldn’t make sense of it. She just knew she was grateful for Holly’s and Sal’s fingers tapping her hands, and their warm bodies close to hers.
The moments passed less jaggedly as Brooke’s brain recovered its fluency, retracing how to think, how to arrange time. Eventually, she could speak again, the sparks cooled in her eyes, her limbs moved as she willed.
Only the tears did not abate. Brooke rose, and dressed, and moved haltingly through the work of getting them ready to leave; she helped the girls pack; she filled their water bottles; she put the disordered kitchen back together; and through it all, with dismaying frequency, she found herself blinking and watery. Milo saw, the kids saw, even Cawley saw, and she could not stop it. Whatever Cawley had knocked loose in her head had uncovered a well of tears that seemed bottomless.
The Captive Page 21