by Lisa Unger
Run, a voice in her head commanded.
But instead she just kept walking inside, drawing closer. On the table she saw two feet in red Converse sneakers, attached to a pair of pale, skinny legs.
“Claire,” said the man, his back still to her. Closer now, she could see that he had thick dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the base of his neck, that his suit was fine, nicer than anything she’d seen her father wear. That his shoes were shiny. “I’ve been wondering when I’d see you again.”
Run, the voice commanded again.
Claire, you win. Come out. Matthew’s voice through the floorboards.
But she couldn’t. It was as if there were a chain from her solar plexus, pulling her forward. She saw a face, the still and peaceful face of a girl she thought she knew. From where? School? Bible class? The girl was lying on the table, and Claire felt the strong urge to help her up from where she lay and take her home, where she surely belonged.
“Stop,” she said. “I need to take her home.”
“Too late, Claire.”
When he turned, his smile was full of blood, and in the palms of his cupped hands there was a beating human heart. She heard the familiar rhythm of its thumping and realized it matched her own.
“You and I will meet again,” the man said.
And Claire started to scream, and scream, but he just laughed, and the room spun and the fog turned to smoke, blinding her, filling her mouth and nose.
Matthew flew down the stairs, found Claire lying on the basement floor. There was no man, no girl, no blood, no beating heart. Near a workbench at the far end of the basement, a light had been left on. A radio was playing white noise, and Ian switched it off, while Matthew helped Claire from the basement and upstairs into the light. She tried to tell them what she’d seen, but it sounded as silly and nonsensical as a dream. A pale man with a ponytail, a beating heart in his hands. A girl on a table. The fog. She had thought they’d laugh at her, but no one did.
“That was the summer that a girl you knew disappeared?” asked Dr. Bold.
“That’s right.”
Even before her attack, Claire and Dr. Bold had talked about the disappearance of Amelia March many times, identified this event as the event that compelled Claire to pursue her career, a deep wish to help the girl who was on that table, and if not her, then other girls like her who slip through the cracks in the world, or who fall prey to the predators that walk among us. The mystery of what happened to Amelia March was still unsolved. A tall, skinny girl with dark hair, last seen wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and a pair of red Converse sneakers. Just gone.
“Had her disappearance been occupying your thoughts, before that night?” asked Dr. Bold.
“People were talking about it. So it had been on my mind, yes. I’d had some nightmares of being pursued, a shadow at my heels, falling down a well.”
“Did you perhaps fall asleep while you were hiding?”
“I don’t think so, but maybe.”
“In the past, you’ve called him the Dark Man. Is that right? Where did that name come from?”
“The next day, when Mason turned up for the first time that summer. He was the one who told us all about the Dark Man.”
Claire completed the five-mile loop and came to a stop at the trailhead, walking a circle to cool off, checking her time, distance, and heart rate on the device strapped to her wrist. Her tether, as Will—the ultimate Luddite—liked to call it. Pretty decent. She was getting stronger.
Back at the house, she made coffee, a breakfast of eggs and avocado. She had Dr. Bold in a few hours, had promised Will they could have lunch, but for now she would try to catch up on email. She felt . . . almost normal.
After breakfast, she logged on to her computer and found a note from her lawyer, informing her that Billy had been found faultless by the review board. “The board,” he wrote, “also declines further investigation of your conduct. Meanwhile, Winston Grann’s family, what little there is of it, has opted not to press any charges against Billy, the hospital, or you. This is good news, Claire. When you’re well, you can return to your work.”
It was good news, but it landed flat, like so many things these days. Trauma could do that, make things seem distant and dull. Still, deep inside, something jangled. She took a sip of her coffee, watched the sunlight streaming through the window, dappling the desktop.
Winston Grann’s family.
They’d talked at length about his abusive mother, his absent father, both now deceased. So to what family was her lawyer referring?
She opened the search engine and entered Winston Grann’s name. His crimes were a decade old, but there was still plenty of information from news articles, podcasts, true crime bloggers.
She scrolled through, as she must have done before, when she’d first started working with him, just to get a clear idea of his deeds. It was an ugly catalog, to be sure. But she kept reading and reading. The morning wound on, as Claire went deeper down the rabbit hole of Winston Grann’s life until she found the thing she was chasing. There was an article about Winston Grann, written years ago, that detailed the crimes of other members of his family. Apparently, the Granns had a long history of violence, as did another branch of the family, the Brandts.
Staring at the screen, she drew in a deep and shuddering breath. Of course, she thought. How had she not connected the dots before? Surely Dr. Bold would call it out as repression, tag it as one of the subconscious reasons she’d kept working with Winston when she should have walked away.
The light in the room changed, and Claire’s coffee had gone cold. She sat with it all.
Finally, her email pinged, and the sound, though soft, seemed to echo. She switched windows, and in her in-box, she was surprised to see the name Matthew Merle, as if she’d somehow conjured it. And she wasn’t surprised. Because hadn’t she known on some level that this was coming? Hadn’t it always been coming?
The subject line: Back at Merle House.
They’d stayed in touch over the years, mainly via social media. She knew he was married, with a daughter. He’d recently left his tenured professorship, suddenly, which didn’t happen without a reason. But she didn’t know what had happened. She still thought about Matthew, her first crush, that last summer together.
As she read, the sun outside moved behind the clouds, and the room grew darker. Matthew had moved his family into Merle House, hoping to fix it up and sell it. Anyway, he wrote, some things have come up. Questions. He wondered if she’d come for a visit. Maybe they all needed some closure, as he put it. It seemed like a strange request, and yet, it wasn’t.
And she found that, yes, she did in fact want to go back for a visit.
The fog descended and swirled, taking her breath as she read. When she was done, Archie was lounging on the couch, feet up, leaning on one elbow and wearing an easy smile.
The barely healed bite on her neck started to ache.
“Claire,” he said, his voice low and dulcet. “You didn’t think a few meds and some daily exercise were going to get rid of me, did you?”
“No,” she admitted, her voice just a whisper.
“It’s time for us to go home.”
He was right, of course. She was always going to go back to Merle House. And to Havenwood. It had only ever been a matter of when. She saw that now. Claire quickly tapped out a response, then rose to start packing.
7.
Why were her parents still married? Most of Jewel’s friends were the children of divorce, shuttling between homes, splitting holidays, getting tons of stuff—iPads, swag from Supreme, clothes from Neiman Marcus—from guilty dads who had hot young wives and new babies. Jenna had even gotten a Vespa (which her mother wouldn’t let her ride, but still!). Why did her mom stay with her dad? He was not her equal in looks or intelligence. He’d cheated on her. When she had cancer. Of course, he swore his innocence. But no one believed him—especially not Jewel.
She watched her parents from the window as they
walked hand in hand out to the barn with Avery March, whom Jewel liked to think of as Lurch. Taller than her dad, with wide shoulders and longish gray-black hair, the Realtor moved beside them with an odd loping gait. There was something wrong with that person. The woman had secrets, was running some kind of an agenda known only to her. And neither of Jewel’s parents could see it because they were so desperate to sell this place.
I hate him, she typed into the text chain she was having with Eldon. Her nails were a wreck, the polish chipping, her cuticles ragged; she hadn’t had a manicure since they’d come to Hurl House, which was what she thought of this dump. It made her want to hurl.
No you don’t, Eldon wrote back. He’s your dad. You might be mad at him. But you don’t hate him.
How do you know?
Because sometimes I get so mad at my dad that I think I hate him. And then by dinner we’re joking around about something again. And then I feel bad for hating him, because he’s just—my dad.
Did he cheat on your mother, lose his job, and move you from your life to the middle of nowhere?
Uh, no.
Okay then.
Hang in there, okay? Things will get better.
She shouldn’t even be talking to Eldon—because she had no idea who he was. She’d met him on Red World, a shooter/world-building game, the new thing everyone was on now. Eldon had been invited to the group, which included most of her friends from Florida—he was a friend of a friend, she guessed. He’d bailed her out a couple of times in the game, once healing a wound with his virtual bandages, once carrying her after she’d been shot.
After that they’d started chatting, and after a couple of weeks they’d exchanged numbers in private messages—which was like a never do. Internet Safety 101. But they’d only ever texted.
She hadn’t told him anything about herself, really, not where she lived, not her social media; no FaceTime, no voice calls. He never pressed for that and she never offered. He could be anyone—a fifty-year-old sex predator in Scottsdale, a twelve-year-old boy in Tampa, a lonely lesbian in Oslo. Or he could be a Chris Hemsworth look-alike who would one day ride in on a Harley and take her away from the mess her parents had made of her life.
Not knowing was one of the nice things about their relationship. It was kind of distilled, purified to its essence, stripped of all the uncomfortable details of real life. He could be anyone. It didn’t matter at all. He was just Eldon—whom she liked. He was kind, smart, and always there. Still, she’d had too many lectures about internet predators not to be leery, and she was careful not to share too much.
Okay, maybe she’d slipped up just one time? In a torrent of complaints she’d issued about the weird town they’d moved to, she might have mentioned the town name, but not the state. And he was like: In New York? That’s not too far from me. But she hadn’t answered, and he’d never brought it up again. He was cool like that. Picking up on boundaries and respecting them.
Lurch and her parents stopped and turned back toward the house for a second, her mom pointing at something. Then they disappeared inside the barn. At just that moment, she heard something. A slam. Then the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor. She’d heard it before; they all had. Its origin was unknown, and it freaked her out every time. Old houses, said her dad, they just make noises. Did they, though?
Her phone pinged: You still there?
She kept her eyes on her open door.
Have you ever seen a ghost?
No. I don’t think so . . . Have you?
I think this house is haunted. Or, like, it’s alive or something. There’s an energy.
Okay. Cool.
Yeah, maybe.
Are you scared?
Sometimes.
Maybe you should call an exorcist. That’s a real thing, you know.
That seemed like kind of a creepy thing to say, didn’t it? Was he making fun of her? She wanted to go suddenly.
So she typed: gtg ttyl
See ya.
Which he probably wouldn’t. They might never see each other in the flesh. That was the beauty of the internet. Relationships without the real-world complications.
Jewel dropped her phone on her bed and headed down the grand winding staircase, past the portraits of a younger version of her father, the grandmother she’d never met, her grandfather. Oil paintings, the subjects stiff and odd looking, shooting for grandeur but falling somewhat short of that. The eyes, though. Whoever the painter was, the signature illegible, had a gift for eyes that seemed to leap off the canvas. She made a point not to look back as she walked through the tall foyer and out the front door.
She was headed to the barn, but then she saw someone standing at the edge of the woods.
A girl, a teenager in jean shorts and T-shirt and a pair of red Converse sneakers, stood in the trees. Wow. Did she look vaguely familiar? Maybe she was cool. Jewel lifted her hand in a tentative wave.
When the stranger disappeared, Jewel followed. A bird chirped in the tree above her, and she looked up to see a little sparrow tilting his head quizzically.
Into the woods.
She’d been tromping around here since they’d arrived. She liked the quiet, how the trees went on forever and ever. She’d grown up in a neighborhood where houses were right next to each other, always a neighbor outside washing the car, or skateboarding up the street, or at the mailbox, or dropping by. There was a bustle, an energy to that life—block parties, coordinated holiday decorating, kids playing kickball in the street, on the corner waiting for the school bus.
Here there was no one. Ever. Just the weird groundskeeper, Peter, whom she’d barely seen, but who spent long hours in conversation with her father. So it was a novelty to see someone who looked roughly her own age. She didn’t realize until that moment how lonely she was. Desperate, in fact, for a real-world conversation that didn’t involve her parents.
“Hey,” she called out when she caught sight of the girl again. There was something odd about her. It was late autumn. She must be cold. Her skin was so pale it seemed to glow.
Jewel kept moving through the woods, feeling the chill, wishing she’d put on her jacket. The girl was fast, obviously trying to get away.
And finally she was gone.
Where did she go?
Jewel was alone in the woods. She kept walking in the same direction; she could still see the high roof of the house to her right.
Finally she came to a clearing where there was a small graveyard, really just a tilting collection of stone crosses. Beyond that was the overgrown, tumbled-down walled garden with the big iron gate that stood open like an invitation. The last time she was in there, she’d come out with poison ivy. She’d wanted it to seem magical. But instead it was just a wreck, neglected and wild, borderline dangerous—like everything here.
She stood, the wind whipping around her.
At the edge of the graveyard, she felt like an intruder, as if she’d trespassed where she didn’t belong. But she did belong, because this was her family home, and most likely she was related to many of the people in that graveyard. The names and dates were worn down to illegibility. She wondered about the people buried there; she knew a little.
There was quite a bit on the internet about Merle House, the land it was on, its history, some other abandoned old place deep on the property, which she hadn’t found yet and didn’t really think was real. She’d been doing lots and lots of reading about it all, and the town. She knew more than her mom did, for sure. And way more than her father knew she did.
“What do you think of this place?”
Jewel spun.
The girl was right behind her. She wore a tattered 4-H T-shirt, and she was tall and stunning in the way of supermodels, her beauty something strange and luminous, almost fearful. She had a beauty mark under her right eye in the shape of an almost perfect heart.
Jewel found she couldn’t answer, only stare into the depths of the girl’s amber eyes. She looked so familiar. Where had
Jewel seen her before?
The girl leaned in to whisper, “I never liked it here.”
Then there was a man walking up behind the girl.
He seemed to leak out of the darkness between the trees. He moved easily, his gait long and elegant. The sun dipped behind the clouds, and a fog descended, falling as suddenly as a curtain. It wrapped around the girl like smoke, drawing her away, her eyes growing wide.
“Welcome home, Jewel,” said the man with the long dark hair and eyes as black and beady as a crow’s.
The girl started to scream, and the sound filled Jewel with terror, and she started to scream, too, calling for her father.
Dad! Dad! Daaadddy!
The fog spun and grew thicker, and the man drew closer, until the world went dark around her. And then everything was gone.
The story continues in part two of Lisa Unger’s HOUSE OF CROWS, Fog Descending.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of Confessions on the 7:45 and many other books. Her short story The Sleep Tight Motel and her novel Under My Skin were nominated for the Edgar Award, and her story Let Her Be was selected for The Best American Mystery and Suspense.