She spun around to find her mother standing in the doorway looking even more exhausted and angry than before. “Did you just throw something? We heard it from downstairs.”
“There was a spider. I—”
Her mom waved that away and walked across the room, picking up her phone and examining the new cracks in the glass with a frown.
“Having your own phone is a big responsibility,” she began. “You know how tight money is.”
Lily’s whole body felt like a fist. “Yeah, I know. We can’t even afford a crappy cleaning service.”
“Lily—”
“There. Was. Almost. A. Spider. On. My. Hand.”
“The solution to that problem is not throwing an expensive piece of technology across the room. I’m just going to take this with me. Maybe in a week, if you can stop all this over-the-top, attention-seeking nonsense, we can talk about returning it.”
“But, Mom—”
“No.” Her mom stared at her, eyes wet, cheeks red, lips pursed, pushed to the edge in a way that Lily had seen only once before. “No. It stops now. No more. I don’t want to come up here again. Go to bed.”
She left with the phone, and Lily deflated. How could the situation have gotten even worse? Now she had no phone. No way to contact CJ. No way to look at those crazy messages and reassure herself that she wasn’t making it all up.
There wasn’t much else to do. Her parents were clearly awake and furious with her, and they’d told her repeatedly to go to bed. She checked every corner of her room and locked the door in case Britney or whoever tried to come in while she was sleeping. She curled up in the little nest she’d made on the floor, feeling the raw wood boards press, cruel and unyielding, against her bones. She thought she might be awake for the rest of her life after everything that had happened, but she somehow fell asleep after midnight.
The next morning, she remade the bed with her mattress cover and sheets and comforter and pushed it laboriously back to where she liked it. If someone wanted to mess with her, she would mess right back with them. As more and more of the house got cleared out, there would be fewer places for some creepy kid to hide and write on things. Which meant that Lily was going to get to work and double her efforts.
She put on a sleep tank and a pair of jeans recently snipped into cutoffs and stomped downstairs. Her mom had apparently gotten up early, and she’d made lots of progress on the den while Lily slept. The heavy white curtains, thankfully, were gone, and light shone brightly through a wall made entirely of dirty windows. Lily could see the furniture now—squishy tan couches and another big, worn leather recliner. The TV was older, though, the kind that was more like a cube. The newspapers and most of the bags were gone, but half of the room was still stacked to the ceiling with Amazon boxes. Her mom marched in the door looking determined and furious, but she softened just a little when she saw Lily.
“Are we going to have any problems today?” she asked.
Lily sighed and felt the full weight of every accusation pressing down on her. “No. What do you want me to do?”
Her mom put her hands on her hips and looked around. “If you can begin in the laundry room, maybe we can start washing things. Jack said the washer and dryer worked.”
Lily hadn’t seen the laundry room yet, but her mom led her there, stopping in the kitchen for the requisite yellow gloves, trash bags, paper towels, and heavy-duty cleaner. The house was put together strangely, with all sorts of odd angles, and Lily realized that there was still a lot to discover.
Her mom left her in a room with industrial shelves still covered with open boxes of nonperishable food. She couldn’t see much of the floor, and she had to assume that the lumpy shapes hidden by mountains of dirty clothes were the washer and dryer. Something smelled utterly horrific, and she wasn’t sure if it was mildewed clothes, rotten food, or something worse. There was a door to the outside, too, and her first goal was to work her way over to it and open it for some fresh—if meltingly hot—air. And to toss a chunk of stale doughnut out for Buddy.
Time seemed to fade away as Lily stuffed stiffened clothes into black garbage bags and hauled them out to the dumpster. Her shoulders and back were sore from all of yesterday’s work, but at least the little aches and pains helped take her mind off last night as she worked. Unlike Britney’s clothes upstairs, the garments in the laundry room weren’t clean or tidy. They were heavy with stains that were dried and weathered into strange shapes.
Lily was starting to get a picture of who had lived here most recently, the person who had left such a disgusting mess behind: the old man her mom had mentioned. There were overalls, ugly pleated pants, and hundreds of yellowed white undershirts. Everything reeked of body odor and cologne. Every time she found a pair of plaid boxer shorts, she was grateful for her gloves. The butter-gold sun beat down through the broken blinds, and sweat trickled down her neck and into her eyes. It was like living in a fever, like breathing soup. Finally, the washer and dryer were revealed, not that they were particularly exciting.
Lily stuffed the last layer of clothes into a full-to-bursting bag and turned to go and let her mom know that she’d followed directions without causing trouble—and that she’d succeeded. But then something caught her eye. A sinister shape sidled out from the dark crack between the dusty white machines. Lily jumped back, her leg pressing against the garbage bag.
It was a spider—the big, hairy, skittery kind.
Little spiders she could deal with. Orb weavers were kinda cool. She’d held a tarantula once, even. And the spider last night, the one that had made her throw the phone—in retrospect, it was teeny. But this was a wolf spider the size of her hand, and it was crawling right at her.
Lily spun around to grab something from the shelf to kill it with, a cobwebbed box of ramen or two-liter bottle of soda. But as she reached toward the shelf, another spider burst out from behind an old cereal box.
The back of her neck itched, and she swatted at it, but there was nothing there. Tiny tickles ran up the back of her calf. A giant spider waited by the light switch, fangs reaching for her fingers. They were everywhere, squeezing out of cracks in the wood and out from behind the washer and out of the black bag she’d been packing with clothes. Hundreds of spiders, brown and gold and black with red hourglasses, pincers working busily, legs softly scurrying. She was frozen in place, numb, as if her body had forgotten how to move. They were on every surface, all of them moving at once, swiftly, right at her.
With a strangled gulp, Lily leapt over the bag and ran back into the kitchen. She spun around, expecting to find spiders here, too. She must’ve broken open a nest somewhere, among all those nasty old clothes. But the kitchen was mostly normal, and she didn’t see a single furry brown body. She snatched a spatula from the mason jar by the old stove and tiptoed toward the laundry room, ready to start smacking. But when she peeked inside…the spiders were gone.
Seriously. She couldn’t see a single spider at all, not even a scrap of web.
It made no sense. Not only the weird things that kept happening, but the way she kept seeing things that weren’t there. Yes, she was dramatic, and yes, she had a big imagination, but the Florida heat had to be melting her brain.
She wanted to tell her mom, but the spiders, like the gushing swamp water in the bathroom, were completely gone. Not that having actual evidence had changed anyone’s mind in her room last night. If she told her mom she was seeing thousands of spiders, it would just be one more dramatic rebellion, one more reason to assume she was going to continue being a problem. Or worse, her mom might think she was legit going crazy.
No, she had to deal with this on her own.
Creeping back into the laundry room, she kicked the black garbage bag full of clothes, but nothing happened. So she hooked her spatula through the pull ties and dragged the bag into the kitchen and out to the dumpster without touching it. Her
mom could toss it in later. When she stepped into the laundry room again, she felt twitchy and cold, as if a thousand—well, if they were spiders, eight thousand—tiny eyes watched her from the shadows. But she didn’t see a single arachnid or bug, not even a mosquito, which were everywhere. Lily’s breathing was still more like panting, and she began to wonder what it was called when you just panicked all the time—for real—and never stopped.
The only antidote to being freaked out by invisible nonsense was to throw herself into work. She was super jumpy as she opened a new garbage bag and began tipping the leftover food from the shelves into it. Bulk boxes of ramen noodles, canisters of drink powder, unopened boxes of breakfast tarts, giant boxes of fiber cereal, and flats of potato chips used up ten more big black garbage bags. It took all her strength to lug the bags outside and line them up by the dumpster, but within a few hours, she had the laundry room all but empty. There was nowhere left for spiders to hide—not that she found any evidence that there had even been spiders.
The last thing she did was fetch the broom and sweep all the dusty crevices. In part because she knew that if she didn’t do it, her mom would just ask her to, and in part to make absolutely sure there were no places where an entire nest of spiders could be hiding. When she shoved the broom in the crevice between the washer and dryer, the bristles scraped over something bigger than the usual dust bunnies.
Lily refused to stick her hand in there, so she used the broom to pry it out. It was a sheaf of yellowed papers carefully clipped together. Unfilled prescriptions from the hospital three years ago. All for a man named Brian Richardson.
There were six different ones, all dated on the same day and signed by the doctor in pen. Lily didn’t know what everything was, but since her mom was a nurse, she recognized antibiotics and heart medicine. Brian—that must’ve been the old man. And he definitely had not been healthy. But if he’d bothered to go to the hospital, why hadn’t he filled his prescriptions? Or changed his horrible eating habits, which seemed to be mostly things that came in boxes? She realized that he had once stood here, holding this same sheaf of papers. The thought made her shiver.
A little girl’s room left untouched and an old man with a hoarding problem who didn’t take care of himself. Oh! And a dog, Buddy, left behind.
Nothing about this place made sense.
There was something else going on, something she couldn’t quite see.
All she knew was that she was stuck here, with whatever wouldn’t leave her alone.
8.
In the end, Lily tossed the prescriptions in the trash. She sprayed and scrubbed the laundry room shelves and cleaned the dusty window until the whole room sparkled. Maybe if they could get the house empty enough and clean enough, it would just be…normal.
As she rubbed the last streaks off the window, the glistening water of the lake outside caught her eye. The afternoon was oppressively hot, but the view was pretty, with sunbeams slanting through the forest and dappled shadows dancing over the water. She hadn’t explored this side of the house yet—the swamp side. She’d done what her mother had asked her to do, so she decided she could take a little time off to poke around the yard.
She stripped off her filthy gloves and chucked them in the last garbage bag. Mom had already taken two carloads of donations to the secondhand store, but it turned out that most of the stuff here was actual trash. Apparently, the previous owners had just stopped taking the can outside and left everything where it fell.
When Lily shouldered open the laundry room door and stepped outside, she felt like she suddenly weighed less, like she’d been carrying rocks and was now light and free. Her mom had bought her a cheap pair of flip-flops on one of her store runs, and Lily didn’t want to ruin her much nicer sneakers, so she slipped on the flops to go exploring—and look for clues.
The gravel path from the laundry room door led around to the lake. It was shadier here, and empty bird feeders and broken mobiles dangled from the tree branches, swaying in the hot puffs of…well, it wasn’t a breeze. It was more like the lake was breathing, the air steamy and moist and heavy. Tiny flowers dotted the path, and as Lily neared the shade of the trees, the ground squelched under her feet. This side of the lake was apparently as swampy as it looked. She stepped under the trees and scanned between the heavy trunks to see what might be hiding within the forest.
Up ahead, maybe a hundred feet away, the sunlight slanted onto ground as wet as pudding, and strange little plants poked up like straws, or maybe train whistles. Where the sun shone through them, they were lit a lively neon green, and iridescent dragonflies buzzed here and there on glittery wings. Lily realized she was looking at pitcher plants—they’d done a unit on carnivorous plants last year, but she’d never seen them in real life. It was actually pretty cool. Step by step, water sloshing between her toes, she waded into the marsh. Just this one little patch of forest was lit up, almost like a fairy spotlight was shining down. Time seemed to stop, caught like a veined wing in amber, like honey in a jar.
For the first time in what seemed like days, she smiled, remembering when she’d played Mustardseed in the local theater’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and fantasized about stepping in as understudy for the adult playing Puck. Her posture changed, and she was almost skipping.
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream…”
She trailed off. It felt good, slipping back into a fairy’s skin, if only for a moment. This was indeed a very puckish place, magical and green and deep. Maybe at least part of Florida wasn’t so terrible.
When she was close enough to touch one of the little plants, Lily ran a finger over its high hat, which snapped down to cover the strawlike end. She jerked her finger back, amused and enchanted. She hadn’t known pitcher plants could do that. But when the top slowly opened again and she looked inside, something wasn’t right.
It looked like the pitcher plant was full of blood.
Thick scarlet liquid pooled there, a dead fly floating in it. Lily checked the next plant and the next, and each one had some old, dead bug floating in syrupy blood. When she looked down at her hand, it was speckled with bright red drops, thick and wet.
Her stomach turned, and she stepped backward and tripped on a root, landing hard on her butt with a splash. The muddy water soaked into her shorts, cold and clammy, and she bolted up and turned to hurry home. But where was her house? All she could see was more of the same boggy forest, thick-rooted trees and drooping branches dangling with curly gray moss. There were no more sunbeams, no more spotlights. The sky seemed to sigh into a soft grayish brown like a hidden bruise inside an apple.
“This isn’t right,” she said to herself, stumbling ahead in the muck. She couldn’t see her house, but she knew it was this way—it had to be. Cold crept down her neck, numbing her fingers.
A sudden movement at her feet made her look down, and she froze.
It was a snake. A big, black, angular thing with a heart-shaped head the size of her fist. She didn’t know what type it was, but she knew it was poisonous—no, venomous—and that it was angry. Its neck was drawn back, its slit eyes gleaming. As it struck, Lily jumped away, turned, and ran deeper into the boggy forest.
The swamp all looked the same when you were terrified and running, and Lily just had to hope that she wasn’t heading toward deeper water, where gators had to live. She pushed vines and moss out of the way, scrambled over logs, and tripped over roots. Her shorts were soaked with mud, and she lost a flip-flop somewhere in the muck. She reached for the pocket where she usually kept her phone, but it wasn’t there. Her mom had taken it last night. All she could do was keep going. Finally, she heard laughter som
ewhere ahead and stumbled toward it.
Soon she saw shapes through the trees. Green grass, bodies moving, a…trampoline? She stepped out of the soggy bog and onto a nice lawn, and two kids stopped jumping on a caged-in trampoline to stare at her.
“Uh, are you lost?” asked the older one, a sporty-looking guy who was maybe fifteen.
“Who are you? Are you new? What are you doing in the swamp?” asked the younger one, a pretty girl about Lily’s age. They both had dark skin, and the girl’s hair was in long twists.
“What…am I doing…in your swamp?” Lily said in Shrek’s voice, realizing as she heard her wobbling words that it was a pretty stupid thing to say, and a slight misquote, and that maybe she was losing her mind. “I mean…” She trailed off. She sounded crazy, and she probably looked terrible. She could feel the sweat matting down her dark hair, the dirt clinging to her mosquito-bitten, blood-flecked hands.
“My name is Lily. I just moved in. I saw a snake and ran,” she finally managed, possibly the least dramatic thing she’d ever said.
“Was it poisonous?” the boy asked.
“Venomous,” Lily and the girl said at the same time, and they both smiled. And then Lily did the dumbest thing in the world and burst out crying.
These were real tears, and they came out hot and heavy. She covered her face with her hands and wished this was all a bad dream.
The girl jumped off the trampoline and hurried over, putting an arm around Lily with the warm familiarity of someone who was already her friend. “Oh wow, so you’re pretty messed up, huh?” the girl asked. “I’m Rachel. That’s Kyle. He’s a jerk. But whatever. Come inside. You probably need some water, right? You look…”
“Gross?” Lily offered between hiccups.
“I was going to say dehydrated.”
Rachel steered Lily inside a flawlessly clean pool cage and sat her down on a patio couch. When Lily gestured to her dirty shorts, Rachel gently shook her head and said, “Carla will deal with it. Now, stay put.”
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