“Who are you?” I asked, reaching for his sleeve. “Who do you think I am?”
He stumbled back. “Get away, you foul thing. I’m getting free of you even if she can’t. Your touch may be cold as the grave, but I know you come straight from hell.”
He walked unsteadily through a pool of whiskey-colored light, disappearing into the darkness on the other side. From the silence came a single gunshot.
When I ran from the room, my ears popped. Listing with vertigo, I staggered down a wide, ruined hall, its tiled floor grown over with moss. Ivy grew through a shattered windowpane, and everything smelled like rot. It ended in a sitting room with water-stained walls, where a pair of striped folding chairs flanked a crushed-velvet sofa. On the table between them lay a stack of fashion magazines. Christy Turlington stared vacantly from the cover of the yellowing Vogue Paris on top. November 1986.
Behind me, someone knocked out “Shave and a Haircut” against the doorframe. It was Ella, looking older now. Eight, maybe. She smiled self-consciously, her lips closed over her teeth, then ran away.
“Ella,” I said, but the air ate it up. When I moved a hand in front of my face, it warped a little, like I was looking at it through flawed glass.
I staggered forward, falling as I crossed the threshold. My knees landed in the deep nap of carpet the color of old ivory. To pull myself up, I grabbed onto the silken skirts of the bed sitting just within reach.
It was a fairy-tale bed, hung to the ground with tattered curtains. Where they were sheerest, I could see the shape of someone lying motionless inside. Dripping candles in tarnished silver holders circled them, releasing a honeysuckle fragrance that filled the air like a drug.
I didn’t want to see what lay on that bed. I didn’t want to be in this room, or in this place. None of it fit together; it was a scrapbook of times and places and someone else’s memories. Althea’s, or Ella’s, maybe. Was the Hazel Wood even real? Had it ever existed? Wherever I was, it wasn’t a house. It was a kaleidoscope. I moved to the window, thinking I could climb out, but I wasn’t on the second floor anymore—somehow I’d made it to the turret. The lawn was a taunting green sea below.
The thing in the bed made a tiny sound, a groan or a sigh, that set the hair from my scalp to the small of my back alight. I ran from the room—
And slid to a stop in a dingy yellow kitchen. A light buzzed overhead, and the stench of dill and old coffee turned my stomach. Thin spring light fell through a dirty window onto a sideboard cluttered with cups. Loneliness clung to every surface, thick as dust. On a mint-colored Formica table sat an empty mug, a water-stained copy of Madame Bovary, a pair of scissors. And a stack of clipped-out newspaper articles.
My hand shook as I touched the top one, splaying out the stack. Upstate Community Rattled After Attack. Search for Missing Jogger Enters Second Week. Link Suspected in Upstate Homicides. Five Victims Later, Mystery Persists in Small-Town Murders. Remains Found, Questions Remain.
Althea had known, then. What she’d let escape, and what they did out there.
A long scream from behind me cut the air in half. I spun around, knocking the mug to the floor. A blue enamel kettle shrieked and steamed on the stove, and a creaking step sounded somewhere beyond the door.
For one electric second I considered running for the window. Instead I stayed still, muscles jumping in my shoulders. The step came closer, closer, then stopped outside the door.
Silence stretched till I couldn’t stand it—the thick, waiting quiet of someone listening for something. I slid forward on the tile, put my hand on the knob, and jerked the door open like ripping off a Band-Aid.
And stepped out into a wall of voices and music and bodies, wrapped in a haze of wax and perfume as thick as syrup.
I was in a ballroom, barely lit. A chandelier heavy with half-melted candles swayed over a crush of dancers, moving to glittery, atonal music that could’ve been the soundtrack to a party in hell.
The dancers swarmed so close together they looked like a mosh pit on a subway car, moving with the music’s headache rhythms. Bits of candlelight caught at teeth and eyes and sweat and the shine of white wax, dripping into their hair and hardening.
I thought I saw Ella in the swing of bodies—older again, but not yet grown. She smiled up at her partner, too worldly, and shifted out of sight. I moved closer, trying to reach her, and the crowd pushed back.
A man with a fresh black eye danced alone, blissed on something stronger than liquor. A trio of women with bodies like fronds wound around each other in a way that looked boneless, their edges meeting and melting together in a watercolor blur. I nearly stumbled over a small figure I thought was a child, until she tilted her face toward the candlelight. The look in her eyes made me step back.
Then I saw something that stopped me cold, filling me to the knuckles with starlight.
Finch. Unmistakably, in the heart of the dancers. Finch in a white shirt, his shoulders heavy with shadows. His eyes were alight and his mouth was soft and all of him bent toward the girl he danced with. She was short and fierce and her hair ran over her back in a bright Barbie sweep.
She was me, me with my hair grown long, and she was looking at Finch with an expression I didn’t think my face could hold.
It didn’t feel like an illusion, or a dream. I smelled sweat and spilled wine and candle wax, and tasted blood as I bit through the skin of my lip. I said his name, or tried to, but the music ghosted it away.
Then the candlelight stuttered like a strobe and the crowd changed, shifted, faces sifting through pockets of shadow and light. It came to me that I was seeing a hundred terrible parties melted down into one, full of people too strange and reckless to be anything but Hinterland. Ella was gone but Finch remained, always, at the center of everything, holding me.
The house was tugging at my mind again, unspooling things I’d dreamed, tucked-away things I might’ve wished for, and mashing them together with the memories that breathed from the Hazel Wood’s walls. My breath came short as the other me let Finch run his hands through the whole length of her heavy hair.
She lifted her face—my face—toward his. The music went shivering and slow, and all of me craned toward them as a feeling like jealousy cut its teeth on my heart. His eyes slid shut and his hair moved in an underwater drift. Even as she leaned into him I could see the glint of her open eyes, still watchful, always watchful. I leaned so far I thought I’d fall, waiting for the moment when their lips would touch.
When they did the music went to static. Someone in a half-mask and legs too long for their body grabbed my shoulder. The kiss sizzled like gunpowder in my chest; I felt too stunned to pull away.
“Join the dance or get out, daydreamer,” the person said into my ear, and gave me a hard shove.
It unplugged me from the party like something ripped, sparking, from a socket in the wall, and sent me tumbling back into a long, empty hall. Ella was gone, Finch was gone, and the girl I might have been had never existed. But the party clung to me in a hazy perfume; I could still smell wax on my clothes.
Then far, far down the hall I saw a closed door with light shining out around its seams. The light was warm and it felt right, like everything else I’d seen in this house was a dream, and this was the warm human light of waking up after a nightmare. The light in the cottage you stumble on in the dark, dark woods. I ran to it, and I threw open the door, and I walked into a child’s nightlight-lit bedroom.