“No,” I whisper. I start to walk back toward the house, tears streaming down my face, but I hear footsteps pounding behind me and turn, fear spiking in my chest.
He grabs my arm and looks into my eyes. “Wait. Don’t go back in the house.” I can’t read his expression, but he says it with such urgency that my heart begins to race.
My voice catches in my throat. “Why?”
“Because no matter how mad you make me, I never want to watch you die.”
I stare at him, frightened. “Why would you say that? Did you do something?”
“I didn’t do anything. I told you, Chelsea—you picked the wrong side.”
But he’s looking up at the lake house with an expression of such pure hatred that I wrench my arm away from him and run. Right into the heart of the monster.
I push the door open slowly, afraid of what I might find. “Chase?” Silence. The candle on the living room table is burneddown almost to the bottom, but someone has placed more around the room, filling it with eerie, flickering light. The cellar door is slightly ajar again, which makes me shudder. I run upstairs and burst into Kennedy’s room to find the candle lit and the balcony doors open, fog spilling into the room. There’s a long, low creaking sound behind me. A flood of hot air. Whispers, or maybe the rustling of leaves.But we’re inside and the windows are in front of me.I grip the balcony door handles, knuckles bloodless, heart beating so fast I lose the sensation of individual beats, a horrifying hum in my chest, and I realize I’m holding my breath.Dare: Hold your breath for one minute.I feel them watching, eyes on the back of my neck.Dare: Hold your breath for two minutes.Footsteps, slow as death.Dare: Hold your breath for three minutes, six minutes, twelve minutes, forever.I turn around to see the attic stairs are unfolded and clap my hand over my mouth to stifle a scream.
“Chels?”
Kennedy’s voice from the attic snaps me out of it. I hesitantly approach and climb a couple of steps. “Kennedy?” She doesn’t answer. I turn away for just a second, and in that blink of time, the ladder snaps up like a snarling pair of jaws, and a terrifying weightlessness surges through me. It happens so quickly I don’t hear myself scream. I shoot upward, falling up the stairs, the world upside down, soundless and breathless, and then down, hard, flat on my back on the attic floor. The door slams shut behind me.
I lie there for a moment, stunned, afraid to breathe. The air feels even more stifling than before, thick and suffocating, like a gaseous form of hot wood. Terror solidifies every cell in mybody. Someone has placed another candle where I took the last one, along with the flip-book, in the center of the room. And they’ve added another creepy touch: a chalk outline of a body in bright red with little spiky lines coming out from it like in a child’s drawing of the sun. I run to the window to shout for help and freeze. Ryan is standing outside, looking up at me with an expression I can’t read. He lifts his hand in a heavy, resigned wave and then turns away.
One in the attic, one in the cellar.The voice is so soft, I can’t tell if it’s a memory or a sound. I am in ruins. I cannot escape her twilight voice. Emily is everywhere. She speaks through me in the lucid in-between. The between that is growing. That thrives on forbidden luxuries like sharpened pencils and pulpy wood, on postcards and newspapers, old books and recipes, pine trees and tarot cards, coffins and rope and bones and skin and everything that burns. There’s a sudden crash somewhere below, and I’m jerked back into the present. I shake myself. No. Not Emily. She wouldn’t turn Ryan against us. She wouldn’t do any of this. None of us are monsters.
There’s a loud banging on the trapdoor, and then Kennedy’s head pokes through the door and she stretches her arms out to me. “Quickly.” I follow her down the stairs and into the master bedroom, locking the door behind us.
“Where were you?” I tiptoe to a window overlooking the backyard.
“I was searching the lake for Mila.” She starts throwing clothes into a suitcase. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Ken. I talked to Mila. I know you’re all hiding something from me.”
She turns to face me, her chin trembling. “Damn it, Mila.” She paces back and forth rapidly. “Tell me why you want to know the truthsomuch. What is so special about the truth?”
I stare at her, bewildered. “Because Emily deserves justice.”
She shakes her head. “This has nothing to do with Emily, Chelsea. It’s about you. Why doyouneed to know the truth? Do you know what I think about the truth? I think truth breaks people. It twists them in knots until they snap. It turns them against one another. Truth is a poison, and we treat it like an antidote. It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t bring anyone back from the dead. It just rips open old wounds.”
I back away from her. “Why are you so angry?”
“You can’t even see when your friends are trying to protect you, Chelsea!”
“I don’t need to be protected.”
She zips up her suitcase. “The less you knew, the better. That’s how it was with Emily. When the truth hurts, friends lie.” Her voice keeps rising in pitch as her speech becomes more rapid. “Everyone does it.”
“Not me.”
She stops short. “You lie all the time, even to yourself.”
“I do not.”
“Please, Chels. You lie to yourself about Ryan constantly. And then you lie to everyone else.”
I stare at her. “You aren’t just talking about tonight.”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not lying anymore. So why can’t you tell me the truth?” I grab my bag, heart pounding.